Asked a line it said, I am tired of dividing

Asked a block it said, I am tired of occupying

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Asked a box it said, I am tired of containing

Asked U+2063 it said

This morning she lost her favorite color. It went away with without making any noise. She shrugged her shoulders, when she realized it was gone, on the plastic Adirondack chair on the porch.

The day when her friend stopped by after their run she made bubbly water, and settled in the exact same chair. Her friend sat cross-legged on the ground. They watched cars going by, their windows reflecting the platinum sun. The fuzz faded on her tongue. The day was as pink as their legs from the run.

Now that her memory went to that sunny day, it wanted to go further, to a time cloudy and soft like a smudged drawing. When she was a child she read the Brief History of the World; She couldn’t recall anything from that book, nor the math formulas, geometries or poems with their perfect rhymes. She had them. She lost them. But their shapes remained somewhere.

History was a neglected subject at school, and the only phrase that jumped out as she tried to think was “sheep fever”, a word that she underlined on her textbook, if she had underlined anything at all. She did not quite understand what history was. If they were just things from the past, how could she never felt living in history? She was too shy to admit her confusion. Ignorance was an afterthought. She also didn’t admit having a crush on the most popular boy who had bright eyes and soft dimples on his face, who ran around, told jokes and had ears like a monkey, and who answered all the questions during math classes when she looked down at her hands, trying to search for an answer. She preferred memories to history. She collected moments and went back to them when she couldn’t catch the gaze of the boy. Those comforted her, even after she learned about the mechanism of memory – the more an event is visited the further it wanders from reality.

She stayed at her grandparents' house for the summers. Her favorite book had a blue cover, from which she learned how to paper marché a bowl. She made flower pots out of canvas strips and pickled watermelon rind. One of those summer days she caught a butterfly in the yard. When it died she buried it next to the lettuce plant. A few weeks later she suddenly thought of the butterfly and went into the soil to find it. She couldn’t find any trace.

Her grandparents took her to the park often, where people sold kites and slinkies and ducklings in front of the gate. Once she saved up her money and brought two ducklings home. Her grandma shook her head as they prepared the styrofoam box together, “ducks are hard to keep around.” Three days later the ducklings were sick. They died on the fifth day. As she carried them out she thought of a turtle she had buried when she was even younger. She was told that turtles lived a long life, but the one she kept in the freezer, wrapped around in newspapers and plastic bags as she looked for the its resting shade, did not.

At the park gate she begged her grandpa for an orange-colored slinky, which cost only one third of what the ducklings did. She could have afforded it herself, but that day she did not have any savings. Another time she had asked for money from her grandfather she told him it was for snacks after school. But instead of vanilla ice cream she bought fifty long plastic straws and wove them into stars.

She went back inside as her bare feet got cold. There she found her computer screen dark. “I’m going for a run,” her friend came downstairs and went out, her running shoes tied neatly. She said okay as she plugged her computer in and moved the mouse. Awake now, you little creature, she thought. For one moment she looked around in silence. Nothing had changed much in this house. Where her books used to occupy, a few boxes, keys and rubber bands piled.

On her screen she typed, “var.” She had just started to write a new function. In a few minutes she forgot about the sun and the chill outside. She could not leave the screen now that she was deep into constructing navigations.

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She toggled her arrow keys back and forth the bracket.

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The cursor moved back and forth. She tried to see if she had closed the brackets properly.

In a few hours, she thought as she continued typing, I’d be taking the train to the city again. She would be either telling or laughing at loud jokes and ask for her third beer. The fern in her room had probably died when she was gone. It would be the third dead plant she tried to keep on her window sill.

When her friend came back they made grilled sandwich together with sautéed apples and sausages from the shack down the road. She remembered making these when having others over for lunch. She was reminded of doing grocery shopping. She had not gone for two weeks. The carrots in her fridge had probably gone too soft, too south.

On the car ride to the train station she called her manager, “I’ll get it done tomorrow. Need to make a few more changes.” Then in her mind she started to sketch out the changes. Outside the window she saw the same trees and land she’d seen many times before. “Blossoms will be everywhere in two weeks,” her friend was cheerful, “spring is fast.” When they got to the station she was given two bunches of asparagus, their tips still purple from youth. Her friend had picked them at the garden on her run.

“Thanks,” she said, “I really {}.” She contained her words in an unspeakable language. Her friend smiled at her as if it made sense. Maybe it did. She knew that was an optimistic thought.

On the train she tried to remember what she had lost that morning, when she woke up. But all she could think of was her friend’s living room, which used to be hers, too, on a snowy day. Big flakes came from nowhere and disappear on the ground into mounds of whiteness. When the night came around she would stop seeing the snowflakes, until a car passed by and threw a back light at the particles flowing in the air.

In my portfolio of the past, which I made a year and a half ago, I said:

Something is at the crossroad of architecture, cartography and art, which I studied. And I am seeing it more clearly everyday.

I have kept this portfolio as its own entity – an archive – because it portrays my state of mind to a certain point, namely, to the day before I started working. It encapsulates my ambition and outlook based on what I knew and believed throughout four years of liberal arts education and even vague, broad, subconscious ideas from childhood. But what I knew and believed was very little, as I soon realized. I was only starting to learn things.

What this “something” has become is still in lack of articulation, not because I have walked too far, or lost faith in what I do, but because the world has grown larger on me. I have embraced difference that I never planned to encounter. So here I am, saying what I was trying to say, but with new knowledge and capabilities:

Something is originating from architecture, or at least the understanding and practicing of its design process, which is a very small subset of architecture as a discipline, not to mention the profession. This kernel of knowledge – this mode of learning, researching and discovering – is being applied to every realm with which I engage. I am no longer seeing it as a definite answer, a shapely object at a distance towards which I am walking. It is not static. And in fact, I no longer see it but can only feel it engrained with what I do everyday.

There is a shift from the what to the how. What I do everyday now is website design – more specifically, websites that makes information more accessible. It sounds all grand and hip and even pretty. Well it has all of those aspects but at the same time, it is more. If I look inward, it is hours and hours of not knowing something yet still wanting to materialize it and materialize it well. To communicate it outward, it is constructing a model with a new language that manifests as a surface which is the screen. And, to quote someone I could not remember, possibly a tweet I saw one morning, “the object is useless without the user.” Site and audience are the fundamental premises that shape the design problem in an architecture studio. The design of a website, like that of a building, goes through the same constraints and produces something that speaks to and for those who are using it. It should be “intuitive” although intuition might not be the best way to describe a user interface. What a website does is to some degree pushing the envelope of intuition by introducing new ways of learning and seeing. It also reveals something that leads to the aha moment – a possible happiness and enlightenment, if you will – I diverge here.

I was offered a piece of advice (or rather, an observation) when I first started making websites. You need to get into the craftsmanship. I have been gnawing on these words. It has meant different things as I learn more. It is not just clean js, clean css, clean everything. It is not just elegance in code (although I know I am still thousands of lines away from elegance itself). It is not even just the seek of excellence.

The will, the practice, the perseverance – they are all one part of craft. Knowing how to do something is simply not enough. Doing it is not enough. Doing it over and again until the best methods have been tried and proven (or discarded) is probably just the beginning of crafts(wo)manship.

So, the will is simple and firm. It is a result from the motivation to learn and make good things. The practice is taking its time, as I keep my head down and merge, commit, push and pull away. Regarding the perseverance, I have a few words to say, that is, crafts(wo)manship in websites is never about style. Using the metaphor of a building, it is not about the facades, nor the pursuit of form. Rather, to paraphrase Eames, we are constrained by what is available at the moment of creation – technology, money, time. The ephemeral design for ephemeral needs, but by that it doesn’t mean that design is transient. Only the product and the style it alludes to are.

So is the day where everything is supposed to come together. The sun comes in with an optimistic beam as if nothing was ever wrong. She rests her head on the shoulder next to her, eyes half-closed, a red hoodie on her stomach. It is warm here. The sun and the smell of donuts and coffee. A couple in their sixties sit on the other side of her. The wife looks surprisingly familiar. Whose mother is this? She saw too many women with similar features at a similar age when she was in college. Dads with grey shiny hair and mothers, bold patterned scarves. Their rented Honda Civics surrounded the only B&B in that small town. It smells of grease and ketchup. The husband is eating an egg and sausage platter.

Another couple sit across her. Possibly early twenties, probably not married. The guy was sitting there by himself for a while, staring at the ceiling. She followed his gaze. The ceiling of this airport reminds her of some European cathedral, of course in a secular, almost profane way. Some kind of dome structure, at the convergence point of each vault there is an opening that brings in the light. The whole terminal is lit. Tables at TGIF are spotless and organized, Heinz and a napkin box at the center of each of them. A symmetry between those light openings and the tables. Is it coincidental or is there a mastermind? When she glanced back at the guy, he was nibbling on some snacks that came with the bagel. His girlfriend had got back with a bagel with cream cheese. She is skinny. She looks generic. All the girls with dirty blond hair, they all look generic.

The shoulder next to her moves. She feels a little more awake now. Flying on Thanksgiving, it’s not all that special. Nothing can be that special these days. Her job is fine. She works at a nonprofit where people still talk about putting up some kind of “web forum” for the organization’s new website. She just got a bike recently, for free. A friend who was moving gave her the vintage cruiser. It squeaks whenever she brakes. Gets the job done, she has nothing to complain about. She is the one who still wears her two-year-old sneakers and has dirty blond hair just like the girl across her. She has a boyfriend, the owner of the shoulder. They have been dating for three years. A marriage might be on the horizon soon. She is still excited by the idea. Frankly settling down isn’t that bad an idea. She would quit her job at the nonprofit and become a stay-home mom. Those feminists advocating for women’s rights, do they ever get tired? Why can’t someone settle for a simpler life?

He owns a home improvement business. In the city people are always looking to renovate. A few years ago the area in which they live experienced burglaries on a regular basis, but now all their neighbors are young families. Children have started to play in the back yard whose fences are high. She rarely sees a face, but only hears the giggles. Little voices.

Never. Never has she had any big dreams. When she came to the city she didn’t have any specific pursuit. She was fine with that. The first two years she worked as a production assistant at a PR company. It was not a stimulating place. People are constrained by all the possible constraints in the world. Time, money and bureaucracy. Usually one experiences one or two of these, but she had them all the whole time. The client would want to do a press release two days before they launch a product. She saw the designers stressing out about the deadline. The end product was never impressive. Like one of those banners she would see at Macy’s. All cheery with some pretty curly font. Her job was simple in the sense it didn’t require much brain work. Scheduling, calling the clients and noting down their requests for the tenth revision. Waiting. Waiting was a way she lived her life. She waited for the bus, for the train. For the day to be over, for the show to start, for her eyes to feel heavy, her brain to shut down. For the morning. For the toast to get firmer. For the coffee to brew even though the beans she got at the grocery store never tasted good. Waiting.

So is the day like every other day when things are supposed to come together. They do. She sits in the plane and look out. The huge machines seem to work seamlessly. She and her little safe world. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top.