Monthly Archives: April 2009

365: Envisioning a Year (again)

Nearly five years ago, I started a project that was designed to catalog a year of my life. By taking one photograph a day, I was hoping to be able to somehow figure out what a year looks like. Well, we got 11 weeks into the thing, and the project promptly died. I never seemed to be able to get it back on track. So let’s try again!

From that doomed project’s introduction:

To begin with, a year is roughly the longest time most of us can easily understand. If we think of time as units with which we work, it is rare to deal with a unit of time longer than a year. We can think, somewhat easily, of “next year” on a daily basis; we do not generally think of “two years from now” or “ten years from now.” When we’re kids, the year is the first long period of time we understand; before we know what a decade is, what a century is, we understand the length of a year. As we get older, our lives are transformed into cycles roughly one year long — school, work, taxes — and we come to define our lives in terms of this unit of time that feels arbitrary and is anything but.

We think we know what a year is. At least, I thought I did, and then I realized that I really don’t know how much is in a year. My journals and my notes stretch back the better part of a decade, and yet I have no clear idea what makes up a year. A lot of life happens in a year, but sometimes nothing happens. It seems like a year is a long time, and it is; sometimes, though, it doesn’t seem long enough, and it isn’t.

In the end, a year is exactly as long as it needs to be.

What is the relationship between the year that we see, and the year that we experience? What are the images that make up our lives over the course of a year? What do 365 days look like?

From 1 May 2009 to 1 May 2010 I’ll be taking a picture a day. Let’s see what happens this time around, shall we?

PS: I am aware other people have done this in the meantime. I’d like to point out that while I didn’t think of this idea first, I did think of it more recently than most people who’ve done the project online. So nyah.

You are all invited to participate, all four of you, so if you want to put your galleries in an on-line location and let it be known to YT where they can be found, we can all get through this together.

Let's just get the mother up there

Yea, and God said to Abraham, “You will kill your son Isaac.” And Abraham said, “I can’t hear you, you’ll have to speak into the microphone!” And God said, “Oh, I’m sorry, is this better? Check! Check! Jerry, pull the high end out, I’m still getting some hiss back here…

Testing and development in progress. Estimated go-live is 1 May 2009.

Do not be surprised if the schedule slips.

That is all. I AM JOR-EL, MASTER OF SCHEDULING!

Crass Consumerism, Hawaii-edition

This is really quite remarkable: Pure Komachi knives by Kai. Knife nerds will immediately recognize Kai as being the genuises behind Shun and Kershaw, probably some of the best knives in production today. Lovely Wife and I stumbled on these in KTA up in Waimea this afternoon and upon learning they were a whole whopping $17 bought a hollow-ground santoku (in purple-pink) and a yellow vegetable knife, figuring “well, at least we have something for the condo, if nothing else.” (I had been contemplating ordering Fibrox to replace the lousy Sabatier knock-offs we have here right now.) A Kai knife for less than $20? Yeah, ok.

I am shocked, shocked, shocked by the performance. Blown away is more like it. I’d never, in a million years, think I would have found a knife that performed as well as my Kyocera ceramic knives for, like, a tenth of the cost — but there it is, in purple-pink. I’m seriously rethinking my knife acquisition strategy as a result of this.

Plus, they’re colorful! Kitchens need more color. It’s just amazing.

(See also Kuhn Rikon for colorful, ridiculously good knives that are suspiciously cheap.)

Edited to add: I have now purchased two more Pure Komachi knives, a fluted sandwich knife and a very strange-looking bread knife. I don’t think I’m ever going to buy another bread knife again in my life.