Yesterday I discovered the Lost and Found section of the Sankt Oberholz blog. Sankt Oberholz is the name of a hostel I stayed at on a trip to Berlin two years ago. The hostel’s blog is 920 pixels in width, has a textured paper background and tabbed navigation that is reminiscent of manilla folders. The english version of the Lost and Found section was last updated nine months ago, although it appears that the german version is updated more regularly.
The author of both the english and german Lost and Found posts is one Frank Wagner. Frank writes in a formal manner which brings to mind the descriptions of an object one might find in a certain kind of novel. It appears that Frank has given much thought to the items that have been forgotten at the hostel by its guests, the way a detective might examine a piece of evidence in order to deduce its reason for existence. I assume that when Frank is not giving guests at the hostel recommendations for sights to see or places to dine, he sits at the front desk and ponders the quiddity of the seemingly mundane. Fantastic.
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Update (3/14): Oh sweet, fallible memory—it turns out that St. Oberholz is the name of a restaurant near the hostel I stayed at, not the hostel itself.
I was making quinoa the other night and my roommate asked me if I’d seen the video of David Lynch doing the same. I said I hadn’t, and looked it up immediately. The twenty-minute video, the first half of which is posted here, is a DVD extra from his movie Inland Empire. I thought it might be handy to have the recipe in written form, so I’ve transcribed it below:
David Lynch Quinoa Yield: 1 bowl Cooking Time: 17 minutes
Ingredients: 1/2 cup quinoa 1 1/2 cups organic broccoli (chilled, from bag) 1 cube vegetable bullion Braggs Liquid Aminos Extra virgin olive oil Sea salt
Preparation:
Fill medium saucepan with about an inch of fresh water.
Set pan on stove, light a nice hot flame add several dashes of sea salt.
Look at the quinoa. It’s like sand, this quinoa. It’s real real tight little grains, but it’s going to puff up.
Unwrap bullion cube, bust it up with a small knife, and let it wait there. It’ll be happy waiting right there.
When water comes to a boil, add quinoa and cover pan with lid. Reduce heat and simmer for 8 minutes.
Meanwhile, retrieve broccoli from refrigerator and set aside, then fill a fine crystal wine glass—one given to you by Agnes and Maya from Łódź, Poland—with red wine, ‘cause this is what you do when you’re making quinoa. Go outside, sit, take a smoke and think about all the little quinoas bubbling away in the pan.
Add broccoli, cover and let cook for an additional 7 minutes.
Meanwhile, go back outside and tell the story about the train with the coal-burning engine that stopped in a barren, dust-filled landscape on a moonless Yugoslavian night in 1965. The story about the frog moths and the small copper coin that became one room-temperature bottle of violet sugar water, six ice-cold Coca-colas, and handfuls and handfuls of silver coins.
Turn off heat, add bullion to quinoa and stir with the tip of the small knife you used to bust up the bullion.
Scoop quinoa into bowl using a spoon. Drizzle with liquid amino acids and olive oil. Serve and enjoy.
If this were a press release, the title would be something like “Disrupto acquires Sleepover.” But since I’m not keen on writing press releases, here’s the story: our friends David Cole and Tag Savage of Sleepover have trucked out their belongings from San Francisco and joined our company here in New York! They started on Tuesday.
I first met David when I was in San Francisco last March, and a couple months after, we hired him and Tag to work on a project with us for BET Networks. They flew out to New York for the first part of the gig, and we rented a sublet in the Upper West Side. There was a patio. We had barbecues.
The thing about David and Tag is they both possess that rare combination of striking intelligence and supreme humility, and as my business partner Mike told me after working with them so closely, “it’s like they’re these old-world craftsmen, the type you’d find building a piece of furniture or a pair of leather shoes by hand, except they just happen to be working in front a computer.” The care and attention they put toward everything they do is infectious; so infectious that Mike and I flew out to the west coast in September to convince them to join the team.
And they said yes! So here we are. The Sleepover brand and their phenomenal Tumblr themes will still be around, but we’ll be taking on new client projects together as the new-and-improved Disrupto.
Last year started out with Mike, Jason and I all working remotely from different states. As a result of the work we did together building Steepster, some opportunities came along that made us pause and reconsider the path of our company. We decided to take on more contract work, and Jason and I both moved back to New York. Toward the end of the year, we hired Ricky Cheng (no relation), a bright young developer we first met at a Steepster meetup, and Matt Quintanilla, a talented designer who’s had extensive experience working in both web and print. With David and Tag, that puts us at a team of seven.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be talking more openly about what we’ve been working on this past year. Steepster’s still going strong on its own, but through the process of building and maintaining the site, we learned that as much as we love tea, we love building products even more. Lately we’ve been working on larger projects with the likes of BET, Samsung and the New York Knicks, but also advising startups and helping them with design, product strategy, and user experience. We all have product development in our blood and think we can do a lot to help big organizations act more like startups, and help startups execute with the best of them.
We’re excited about the new year, the new direction of the company, and growing into our new office near Madison Square Park; an office which will soon have a kitchen, conference room, arcade cabinet and arduino-wired door (more on this later). We’re even more thrilled to be doing all this in the company of a group of friends with whom we share a deep respect and mutual admiration.
If you’d like to keep up with what’s happening with the company, check us out on Tumblr and Twitter. Onward to 2011!
At the beginning of 2010, I decided to do my New Years’ resolutions a little differently. Instead of making a plain list of things I wanted to accomplish, I tried to plan out the entire year, month by month, thinking it’d be easier to focus on a few things at a time. Shortly after, a friend confirmed my instinct by sending me this article in which science writer Jonah Lehrer explains that willpower is like a muscle, and a weak one at that—it gives out when you put it under too much strain and gets easily distracted by white elephants, resulting in chocolate cake binges (I’m paraphrasing here). Lehrer’s year-end advice:
We should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the entire year.
Here’s what last year’s resolutions looked like (business goals excluded):
January: Enjoy Michigan / Spend time with Family / Henry Ford Museum February: [Move back to] New York! / Host a Party for Friends / Write Write Write March: Visit SF/LA / Secret Project / World Tea Expo? / Write Write Write / SXSW? April: JAPAN!!! May: [Return to] New York / Secret Project
I stopped there, mostly likely out of laziness (damn that feeble willpower) and rationalized the half-plan by telling myself that I’d leave room for unexpected things to happen. And happen they did—my Japan trip got moved to June to coincide with a trip to visit family in Shanghai, and Mike, Jason and I made a bunch of significant decisions regarding our business in the spring, shifting to opportunities that couldn’t be done remotely anymore. In the end, I hit all my travel goals and met many of you intelligent, fine-looking and talented people in March.
Improvements for 2011
Month-by-month planning forces you to think in shorter-term bursts. Sometimes that works—in the case of trips, check-off-your-list-type things and instances when a month is enough time to build a healthy habit. But other times, good habits take longer to develop and vices take longer to break. Some of my resolutions could’ve also benefited from more definition—ie. write how much?
I’ve repeated the exercise this year, with a few differences:
I didn’t half-ass it. I plotted out as much as I could in one sitting, then came back to it later with a clear mind and finished it.
Every resolution was actionable—launch this, do that, visit here. On a separate list, I wrote out every single thing I could think of that I wanted to improve about myself and then went through and brainstormed actions I could take to make them happen.
Lastly, I put the one or two most important goals up front, and gave them room. If I accomplished those things without getting anything else done for the rest of the year, then it would still be a major success.
I came away from this exercise with a slew of things I hadn’t even realized I wanted to do. I think that’s because our innermost wishes can be incredibly nebulous; we have to look at them from the right angle, in the right light, through the right lens to see them clearly. To me, that’s what all these goal-setting exercises are about—swapping out lenses, changing out bulbs, moving a step to the left, until you reach a point when it’s enough to say, hey, that looks like something.
I can’t remember when I first saw Ray and Charles Eames’ 9-minute tour of the macro and micro universe. I want to say that like so many others over the last thirty-some years, it was shown to me in a middle school science class, but something about this memory seems off; it feels borrowed—like I’m trying to take something from our collective memory of the film and make it my own.
Maybe I’d been acquainted with somany of the film’s offspring over the years, that when I did actively seek it out a couple years ago, it felt like we’d already met; as if a piece of the Eameses’ thoughtfulness has proliferated even after their physical beings had left us. It speaks to the longevity of what they were able to create in their lifetimes, like a drop of ink that blooms inside a glass of water and diffuses over time, making the two wholly inseparable.
It was the only english sign in the whole place. It said:
< Omokaruishi > This means heavy light rocks. If you felt this rock is light you will get your wish.
The words had been printed on a sheet of paper, laminated and attached to the bottom of a wooden sign that said the same exact thing, except in Japanese. Next to the sign was a pair of egg-shaped rocks resting on stone pedestals that looked like giant candlestick holders. I watched as people walked up to the rocks, made an offering, put their hands together and made their wishes. Then they would lift one of these magical rocks, and come away from the experience with a secret and a smile.
The omokaruishi sit near the entrance of the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan. In Shinto, Inari is the god of rice and more generally the patron of agriculture, industry and commerce, which makes the Fushimi Inari shrine, the head shrine of Inari, a popular destination in Japan’s business-driven culture. Guarding the shrine are a pair of bronze kitsune (foxes) wearing protective red bibs:
Foxes are considered Inari’s messengers, and thus closely associated with prosperity and worldly success. The kitsune also make for a playful twist on the traditional ema—wooden plaques on which people write their prayers and wishes and hang at shrines for the gods to receive:
And I haven’t even gotten to what is by far, the shrine’s most recognizable feature: the ten-thousand-plus orange torii:
A twin tunnel of smaller orange gates leads the way from the street entrance to the main shrine, which sits at the bottom of a small mountain. Thousands and thousands of larger gates line the stone steps up the mountain to numerous smaller shrines along the way. The torii are donated and inscribed by both businesses and individuals, grateful for their prosperity. If these gates look familiar, it might be because they were the original inspiration for The Gates in Central Park.
Mind you, everything I’ve described so far I only learned about afterwards, when I looked up the place on Wikipedia. At the time, there was nobody with me to explain what the torii meant and why there were so many of them. In fact, there was hardly anybody around at all as I traversed the mountain path, for I’d landed in Japan in the middle of their rainy season.
Every year, starting around the beginning of June, the majority of the country turns consistently overcast for a month and a half. The storms that day had been particularly bad–probably the worst I experienced over the course of my entire two-week trip. Pebble-sized droplets ricocheted off the orange gates; it sounded like I was surrounded by a bunch of people running their hands through big bowls of M&Ms.
It was late in the afternoon, and I was already exhaused from a day of walking around and visiting other temples. I was hungry, drenched in sweat and my socks were wet from the rain. I had also foolishly decided to bring my laptop with me that day, thinking I could find a place to sit and get a little bit of work done. I really felt those extra pounds as I hiked up the mountain. My mind bounced back and forth, trying to decide whether I was being stubborn for not stopping and turning back around, or if I was giving up too early by not climbing all the way to the top.
And then I thought about the omokaruishi.
I’m not a very superstitious person, but I’m a believer in making wishes. Anything that gets you to pause and think about what your dreams and goals are is a good thing in my book. And what I love about the omokaruishi is that they’re actually about more than just your wishes; they’re about your expectations too.
The rock is a test: if you approach it expecting it to be light, then you’ll get caught off guard, maybe even become discouraged, when you discover its real weight. If, however, you approach the rock expecting it to be heavy, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the ease with which you can lift it. And if you’re the kind of person who takes on new challenges in life prepared for their heaviness, then maybe that’s the kind of person that wishes come true for.
Another great thing about the omokaruishi is that even if you understand it’s really an expectations game, it’s a different experience when you go and lift the rock. When you feel the weight of it in your hands, it reveals what you actually believe, rather than what you think you believe. The omokaruishi are indeed magical rocks, but not the kind where a genie comes out of a lamp and grants your wish. Instead, it’s the kind that shows you who you really are. And I think that’s the best kind of magic.
