Don’t overthink it.
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“ Workaholics are driven by fear, and I have not found myself in a position where I need to spend six or eight more hours at work because I’m trying to make everything okay.
[…]
If you’re in this frame of mind and need control, being a workaholic is a socially acceptable way to try to achieve that. Your boss thinks it’s great, and you can get a raise for doing it. In the short run, it works really well because you can — at some level — control what you’re doing and keep pushing the ball forward. You get into trouble when you get better at your work, and there’s an increase in the number of people who want to interact with you and have you do more. So this kind of working method doesn’t scale— you end up exploding.
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“We almost always used “things” as a way to identify ourselves and to identify others. Let’s start with the human body. In traditional cultures, the art of tattooing was about social coding. A certain number of tattoos meant you’ve been married. Another number of tattoos meant that you’ve had children. This many tattoos meant that you’ve killed a lion. Nowadays, we have a tremendous emphasis on dress and makeup and in our rituals of buying. I use the word “rituals” very specifically. But our rituals of consumption are no longer as satisfactory to us … because they are empty of human relationships. There was recently a wonderful study done on garage sales. When people go to a garage sale to buy something, they actually feel very satisfied about the interaction. Most of the time, it’s because the object they buy comes with a story—a very real, personal story about where the object fit into someone’s life. Whether it’s real or not, you connect with that person through the object. So when you take the object, your purchase of it is more satisfactory. Whereas right now, when you go now to a store, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on branding that tells authentic stories in order to … sell more stuff.” 1 Comments -
“Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.” - 2 weeks ago
- 137 notes
- #reading
- #quotes
- #you guys
- #this book
- #bear with me while i quote the whole thing
- #thesis
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10 Ideas Driving The Future Of Social Entrepreneurship | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation 1 Comments -
“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.” 5 Comments -
“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more,” says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.” 6 Comments -
“Virgo: This week is a good week for clarity, a good week for reflection, a good week not to even move at all, to poke at your thoughts, to watch the way they move, the ways they loop and dive. Watch for the times they get shaky and scared. Just sit, as long as you can, with the things that make your thoughts turn scary and weird. Make plans to go visit your old friends, to make tacos, to tell jokes, then to get quiet and listen to Nick Drake out on the porch.” —These are my very favorite “horoscopes”
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“No country has achieved equality and no country will until women can navigate public places without experiencing or fearing street harassment.”
—Holly Kearl, Christian Science Monitor
This semester we were tasked to take the concepts of emerging technologies, the ever present “big data,” and the realities of urban life and imagine a future of how that all may change our daily lives. Being a team of four women, my classmates Willa, Shelly, Mini and I gravitated towards problem we wanted to address: harassment and intimidation in the streets. Through our research and prototyping, we wanted to address the isolation and feelings of shame that often comes from experiencing this harassment. We felt the issues we were dealing with needed real visibility - in the streets.
Change the Story: Urban Fiction 2013 from Minsun Mini Kim on Vimeo.
Because organizations like Hollaback are doing amazing work collecting these stories, we didn’t want to duplicate their efforts. We wanted to take the stories collected, and put them back into the physical space where the incidents happened. Through a cold email, we were able to arrange a call with Hollaback NYC, to explain our project, and secure permission to use their data as a jumping off point.
Through a series of poster prototypes with stickers and a web presence, we formed Change the Story. The posters tell a story in the location where that incident happened and supporters can take a sticker from the poster to wear as a symbol of solidarity. Our vision imagines a future where these stickers can be more than a symbol, and also act as a physical connection between people who have decided to take a stand against harassment.
Thanks again to Hollaback, for their support in completing this project!
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We just wrapped our first year of the IxD grad program at SVA, and to say it’s been intense is an understatement. I’m currently in the process of putting the shambles of my apartment back together after the final two week sprint to the finish, where I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t actively finishing up a project for school.
Which is why I admire my classmate Willa, who is not only working just as hard as the rest of us, but actively planning a wedding as well. And when it came time to launch a project for our Entrepreneurial Design class, she gravitated towards tackling one of the most awkward of wedding reception interactions: the signing of the guestbook.
Now while I have not had my own wedding, but I’ve been to plenty, and the guestbook signing is always weird. I’m genuinely overjoyed for my family and friends, but after waiting in the guestbook line, with the pressure of a queue of people behind me, I generally muster up a lame and generic, “Congrats on the big day!”
The We Guestbook Project solves that with beautifully designed handmade cards that you can leave at tables for your guests to fill out at their leisure while they eat. They come with prompts to encourages guests to leave a personal story, getting them over that, “Ah, what do I write?!” hump and giving the couple a more heartfelt and meaningful collection of messages from their loved ones.
Check out more about the project here, and you can purchase cards from the project’s Etsy shop. And definitely check out more of Willa’s work!
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Grad school year 1 finished, and I have iced coffee and a park. Perfect day is perfect. (at Prospect Park (Long Meadow))
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