when i was 16 years old i had the opportunity to be an exchange student in belgium for an entire year. and i took it. everyone knows the trope of the person who studies abroad for a semester in college and comes back with an australian accent, or italian mannerisms, or a non-American belief that the government has a responsibility to actively make the lives of its citizens better. i haven’t met that many people who were exchange students in high school, though, and usually people are surprised to hear it when i tell them about it. which i do, still, sometimes, even though it was a long time ago now.
one of the first days i got there, maybe one of the first days i was spending with my new host family, i broke a bone in my hand. i was still jetlagged from the trip and giddy from being in such a strange new place and my head was swimming from trying to keep up with french being spoken at a normal conversational pace instead of glacially slowly as it had been in all of my language classes in school. i was vulnerable, in other words, to bad judgment and the material consequences thereof, and i tripped on a curb when i was racing my host brother to the family’s car and slammed my hand into the ground.
i don’t know if you’ve ever broken a bone but sometimes, there’s a moment that stretches, before the pain really hits, if it ever does, a moment where you pick yourself up and your adrenaline is still firing and the skin on your hands is stinging brightly from being blasted off by the pavement, but nothing else seems to be wrong, none of the deep, sharp pains you might expect from fracturing something so fundamentally important as a Bone. and you think well that was embarrassing but it looks like i’m okay, i think i tore my jeans, dang, and you reach down to brush some gravel off your skinned knee and you realize one of your fingers doesn’t really bend the way it should.
it never really hurt but there was definitely something wrong with it, and as we hurried back inside the house, my new host mom gradually convinced me that in fact yes it was more than likely broken, unbroken hands and fingers should move more than that, look at your right hand, it looks normal, now look at your left hand and comparing the two, it really does sink in. i broke one of the finger bones that lives inside your hand, and it was a spiral fracture, so the bone actually shortened, and after the adrenaline high receded to a sort of shaky breathlessness, it became very obvious.
we went to the urgent care clinic (or whatever they call it over there) and i got an x ray and confirmed that yes, it was broken, and in fact broken to the point where the doctor kind of recommended surgery, but not forcefully, it was up to me, and i said i need to think about it, i need to talk to my host family, and i need to talk to my actual family, and all of these conversations were taking place in that strange western european language mode where everyone hears your accent and wants to speak english with you but you often hit walls where one or both parties realize that no, in fact, neither of us really learned specific medical information and terminology in each others language, so you resort to an intermediary.
when i got ahold of my actual family, my mother freaked out. i think that’s putting it lightly. she’s reading this, i think, and i think she would agree. the idea of me getting surgery in another country was appalling to her, and this was the mid-2000’s so perhaps at that point it still hadn’t become glaringly obvious that many countries in western europe do handle things like medicine and medical procedures much better than in the united states. i didn’t really like the idea of surgery very well either, for different reasons i think, but what i really couldn’t handle as a 16-year old outside my country for the first time ever was the idea of bailing on my european adventure after like four days, just so i could get my hand fixed.
and after all, the doctor hadn’t insisted - it was more of a suggestion.
so that’s why to this day my ring finger on my left hand is about a quarter inch shorter than it should be.
and that’s why i have such a hard time playing an F chord on a guitar, and why my pinky never seems to be in the right place as i’m trying to learn how to play “I Need My Girl” by the national.
let’s get into it.
1. painting
more people snoozing. more blues and greens and golds.
if you follow architecture blogs much (i don’t know why you would) you could be forgiven for thinking that the only type of architecture they are currently building in Vietnam is these tall, narrow houses formed by two solid parallel planes, connected together by a delicate tracery of sleeping platforms, overlooks, staircases, and open-air rooms.
well, i think that’s just great.
also i like drawing quiet mysterious places with people snoozing in them.
initial sketches - loose linework, and then some actual perspective constructing. you can see there was gonna be a spiral staircase in there, maybe, but then i decided i didn’t want to try and figure out how to draw a spiral staircase in one-point perspective like this.
building up on the base of the perspective constructions, the final linework is a combination of things that make sense and me just goofing around.
initial color pass.
more color, overlays, textures, and tweaking. i added some hanging gold objects. i put some highlights on plants. i also forgot to put a face or any human characteristics on that person snoozing in the foreground.
scroll up for the final.
2. poem
“witness poem” - winter 2021
i’m weaving all over this neck of the woods
in my little orange car
like a thread?
stitching all these little scraps together, or at least,
it looks like that —
or like a bug
scrambling around senseless
with one more sunset to go
3. seitan II
this week i’m figuring out what to do with all that extra seitan from last week. they don’t all have to be big new food projects. and i hit my weekly limit on reubens, i think.
looking at this stuff, it looks an awful lot like the pork belly slices you get in ramen. and with food, i think looks matter sometimes. sometimes enough to make up for other stuff. also i had a big huge hunk of this stuff i needed to get rid of so what’s the worst that could happen?
i decided to slice it up and let it marinate for a while. after so deciding, i realized that i really don’t know much about seitan as a food. with meat, you learn some basic skills and rules about rubs, marinades, searing, baking, broiling, and so on. you learn, to some extent, what knobs you need to turn to adjust things like texture. seitan? i got no clue. but i figured marinating it might soften it up.
i think it’s soy sauce, some vinegar, a dash of red wine, some oil, and some spices (various.) i let it sit for a couple hours while i ran to the asian grocery store to get some unrelated supplies. and some bok choy, which was related.
i also made some black garlic oil. essentially you mince a bunch of garlic then cook it in oil over low heat for quite a long time and let it almost burn. then you blend it up so it’s a little smoother. pretty easy. very flavorful. although i don’t know what i would put it on besides ramen. i guess i’ll do some experimenting.
after marinating, these guys felt maybe a little more tender, but not significantly. heat seems to make seitan softer, so i threw them in a skillet to sear them up. they certainly look very delicious!
i didn’t really take notes on the rest of the process, but the soup base includes things like vegan beef bouillon, which gets added to some chopped green onion & mushrooms & garlic that have been sizzling for a bit. also some miso paste and a little tomato paste. what else. water. a little plant milk for creaminess. ginger i think. really i just kinda winged it. and then threw in some bok choy and some other little topping scraps from the dozens of various jars sitting in my fridge.
the seitan was pretty good but very chewy. the texture was not the same at all, it did not melt in your mouth the way that pork belly does. oh well! still tasty.
4. roofs should have eaves
roofs should have eaves. if it’s raining and your roof has a peak, it should also have an eave. you can do a shed roof, i guess, but i would still suggest an eave. you can do a flat roof with no eaves if you must, but you’d better do it flat everywhere. you’d better not put eaves on it, actually, in that case, if you’re doing a flat roof, because then you have to figure out what happens at the edge of your eaves. do they even call it an eave, on a flat roof?
if your roof is pointing downhill and water is sliding down it, you should have an eave at the bottom to carry that water out away from the walls of your house. you can put a gutter on the end if you want, and this is easier when you have an eave, sometimes. of course then you do have to look at a gutter, but they make pretty nice gutters now. of course then you do also have to get the water from the gutter back down to the ground, so you’d better think about that as well.
you might find yourself in a situation where you just got to work, you’re running a little late because there was a long line at the espresso place, they have free coffee at work but it’s not very good and anyway that free work coffee is one more little thread connecting them to you and also anyway you deserve a little happiness, a little agency. you just got to work and you just hung your big drapey shapeless charcoal coat over some kind of sleekly polished wood shape that might be attached to the wall or might be freestanding but in any case was probably designed by someone called Hans, and you’ve just wiggled your mouse and your monitors are lighting up and your computer is winding up and your colleague pops their head over the top of another cluster of monitors nearby and does a little eyebrow waggle at you through their round gold wire frame glasses in a way that lets you know you should go over and talk to them.
so you might bring your espresso talisman with you across the aisle and peer over your colleague’s big drapey shapeless charcoal shoulder at their screen (they do not mind the free office coffee and are therefore already getting a jump on the day) and you might see some sort of cube house with a gable roof on the screen, spinning around in circles as your work partner / adversary orbits it just a little too nervously. and they might say something like “what do you think, i think we should do the no-eaves thing here, it’s kind of a riff on the idea of a house but clean. modern.”
and at this point you could say all kinds of things, you could talk about water infiltration and the recklessness of stacking your gutters directly over your exterior walls, or worse, setting them up the slope a little bit so they’re actually over your ceiling, and you could ask what happens when it freezes, like it does in your city sometimes, and all the ice backs up and levers open your roof, cracks it open like a shell. you could roll your eyes at even the idea that “riffing on the idea of a house but clean, modern.” is something interesting or worthwhile or novel to be doing anymore. you could point out that everything looks like this now, that there’s no way they’d nail the details well enough to make it even look decent, even if all we cared about was the project photography, you know the budget on this one and it won’t let them do it right, so let’s dial it back a little bit on the fancy detailing, let’s not get over our skis.
you could, briefly, again, as always, ask yourself why you’re here at this place, with its echoing concrete floors and exposed timber ceilings and self consciously slick furniture selections and un self consciously creepy upper management who coincidentally seem to have hired a whole passel of drapey shapeless charcoal wool clad 24 year olds who are at least two standard deviations above average in the looks department, and who are outwardly thrilled to work 50 hour work weeks, if this is what we’re doing, if this is what that leads to, doing some kind of “riff” on some kind of “idea” of a “house.”
you might say, though, at that point: “what if we did eaves?”
well i think that will do it for this week. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.