Soul TrippIn(dia)

Dear wonderful humans at Creativeland Asia,

What an unbelievable opportunity. Adventuring with you all would truly be a dream. I'm a passionate lady with creative spunk who has been hungering for India for almost a year now as I make my jump from the land of public policy to animation.

In 2012, I moved to Detroit with three of the most talented people I know to start a design collective, Wedge Detroit. We wanted to take creativity and art to a place with a rich history and a lot of need.

Infamous for its abandoned sidewalks, we had a crazy idea over beer one night--a world record long hopscotch. Too young and stupid to know how young and stupid we were, we went through with it, and Hopscotch Detroit went from conception to birth (video here).

Hopscotch grew past our expectations, receiving a lot of press locally, nationally, and internationally, and just earlier this month, a group of equally crazy folks in Seattle decided to create another hopscotch course for their town.

Also...I once gave a TEDx talk about aliens.

But that's another story and shall be told another time :)

Cheers to you all. Looking forward to hearing from you,
Ajooni

The Neverending Story

I started crocheting triangles two night ago to realize an image in my head of a geometric scarf.

I quickly became amazed at how much math is actually going to have to go into this project--crocheting the triangles to the right height, width, angle--so that they all fit together. The enhanced complexity got me excited. Maybe this will turn our beautifully... Maybe I'll make more, and they'll each be unique knit-mathematical wonders, and more people will want them, and I'll make MILLIONS!

Or maybe I'll say "Screw it!" when I get too frustrated and choose to get distracted by something else. And something else... and something else....

Or maybe I'll say "Screw it..." but continue through it anyway, knitting triangle after triangle, and force the pieces together and create an end product that will actually be something beautiful, and I'll take this to mean that we exist in a network of braided mystery, and that we often times plan too much when the best results are those we couldn't have planned for.

Or maybe I'll say "Screw it" and continue anyway, and create a truly beautiful end product that I hadn't planned on and take this to mean that there isn't a rhyme or reason to anything, that nothing is in our control, and therefore it doesn't matter what we do or what we create because it eventually will just be completely pointless.

Or maybe I'll become obsessed and keep knitting triangle after triangle, searching for that perfection I see in my head and maybe people around me will start to worry and, after failing to make me stop, will send me to a mental institution, which, to my pleasant surprise, I discover is actually a secret think tank where all the "crazies" get to do their work, each focused on themselves too much to focus on someone else being crazy.

OR maybe I'll cycle through all of these iterations, slightly different each time, just different enough to make them feel new, and then I'll open my journal to write about that particular time and accidentally fall upon a page from two years ago in which I describe having the exact same emotion, surprised in the present moment of how I have absolutely no recollection of it.

At which point I'll laugh. Or cry. Or journal about that. Or knit a scarf.

I just read the title of this blog post and chuckled again. First because I realize that I got completely sidetracked from writing about the book I am currently reading--The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. Second because I realize that in not writing about The Neverending Story, I ended up writing a neverending story.

Perhaps every story has within it a neverending story.

But that's another story, and shall be told another time....

Infinite love,
Joonia

German eye twitches

A German girl woke up one morning after a particularly fantastic dream with a peculiar twitch in her eye. She stared at herself in the mirror for a long time. When she asked those around her if they could see the twitch, they said, "Nein." She left the matter there.

Thirty-two years later, a German scientist woke up with a distantly familiar twitch in her eye. She did not bother to ask those around her if they could see it. Her husband would have mentioned it, but did not want to make her self-conscious. After three days, the twitch had not gone away. The woman stared at herself in the mirror a long time.

The German scientist lady proceeded to dedicate the coming years of her life to studying every muscle in the human face; she wanted to know what each of them did, how they were connected to the human brain.

In 2008, she released a study. Of her many findings, one revealed that in every human--no matter race, gender, nationality, or musical preference--there is a small muscle located near the outer eye which, in 100% of homosapien sapiens, will twitch, ever-so-slightly, when one experiences pleasure. The twitch is so automatic, instantaneous that one cannot prevent the response, even if they tried, even if they really, really wanted to.

Perhaps we can never be on the "wrong" path. What else twitches in us that we don't realize? Where do our feet start taking us when we're not paying attention? What are the rest of our bodies saying that we can't or don't want to vocalize through words? How do the things we want but don't admit to, the things we're afraid of wanting, how do these wants bubble to the surface?

Perhaps we can never be on the "wrong" path because we can only ever be our own, twitchy selves. Perhaps we can just decide how much we indulge our twitches, follow them, how fast or slow we decide to move on our universal wavelength.

(German scientist back story may contain dramatizations.)

Ears

A few months ago, I was in California staying with a friend. He dozed off early, leaving me alone with a lump of clay.

He woke the next morning with this at his bedside:

I later gave the ear a cartilage piercing and made it into a necklace. He started to wear it, which led to more people wanting ear necklaces (???). I sculpted more ears for more people, feeling intrigued by them without any of us really knowing why.

A week later, Italo Calvino told me:

"It is not the voice that commands the story--it is the ear."

A few months out of the ear trade, the topic came up again with my friend, Alex, who was finishing editing a series of four films he had made over the past year, one of which we made together.

"I keep hesitating at titling the project. For me, the films have a connective thread, but I don't want to name that thread. That's for the viewer to create."

"You know, there's this quotation..."

Alex is unleashing the film project, "Shape of an Ear," online this month. The films are beautiful, each having that essential something which perks ears of all sorts. You can watch (/hear) it here.

Hopscotch Seattle !!! :) :) !!!!

Yesterday, there was a whole lot of sidewalk chalk happening in Seattle.

A few months after Hopscotch Detroit, a group in Seattle contacted us about taking our idea to Seattle. We were so happy--it's exactly what hopscotch was about: people putting initiative behind creative and crazy ideas to connect with those around us, taking it upon ourselves to use the resources at our disposal and create our own opportunity to engage our community, both its people and its public space.

Hopscotch Seattle happened Saturday, June 1st.

Eight months ago, Sol Neelman, a contributor for WIRED (and an intensely and wonderfully strange man), flew down for his first visit to Detroit to see Hopscotch Detroit for himself. Author of Weird Sports and living in Portland, Sol had the opportunity to go to Hopscotch Seattle yesterday as well. 

Fortunately for me, he sent me the following photo. Unfortunately for everyone else in my check out line at Costco, I broke out into a combination shriek/smile/cry, and confused a lot of Saturday afternoon grocery shoppers. ("I'm really sorry. Whole sale just gets me emotional.")

Here are some of Sol's from Hopscotch Detroit:

 

Congrats to our Seattle hopscotch family. You took the idea and pushed it even further, transforming it into something so beautiful for your community. Inspired.

More from Wedge here.

One jar at a time, kiddo

"Profitez-bien" is one of those expressions I wish would transcend the barrier of language and import itself into the English language. It means, more or less, take advantage of. "Profitez-bien de ta journée," "Profitez-bien de ton voyage," "Profitez-bien de la France."

Wherever you're going, love the hell out of it and take it for what it's got.

But how do you "profite" from everything? 

I'm coming to the panicky phase of my study abroad experience, where the end is in sight and you can't believe it is. Where you start to think there wasn't enough time, you didn't do enough, you have so much more to see. You get bogged down a little. You start counting days. You start missing things you haven't even left yet. What about those places I never visited?   What about those people I never met?

Ironically, this is exactly how I felt when I left Michigan. I was worried about the things I was leaving behind. The things I wouldn't get to experience, the people I wouldn't get to be around. College is so short already—why was I leaving? Leaving these amazing people, this amazing town, my nooks that I have learned how to navigate, a place where I know how to "profite."

But the thing is, you'll never have enough time. You'll never get to do everything. Doing something inherently means sacrificing something else. 

My dad always gets angry at me for saying "yes" to everything, having my hands in too many jars of jam or whatever that expression is, and feeling a need to be a part of everything. 

I've recently discovered why I've always been like this. It's because I have a fear of missing out. I'm scared of not experiencing something. Of not experiencing everything. Chance and happenstance have so often lead me to Eden that I don't want to let go of any occassion or opportunity. But in doing that, in trying to "profite de tous," and in beginning to worry about if you are doing so or not, you profite less and less. You regret rather than dream. You forget that you're in the middle of France, on the edge of the world, and two months is 60x longer than any housefly ever had.

You can never have enough time to do everything. You can never be in two places at once, and even if you could each place would appreciate you less for not having you there wholly. You can't go to every country, you can't meet all the people in the world that could change your life and give you euphoria. You can't, babe.

And that's not awful. 

This realization makes me think of one of my favorite conversations I ever had. It was with Poonam. We were talking about death--I was in one of those funks I used to get in when thinking about "the big black blob." They started in middle school and would come every couple of months or so. I would start to think about my own death, what it would be like to not exist and try to put myself in that state. Then, an emotion that could have quickly tumbled into panic if I didn't immediately draw myself out.

"I just can't help thinking that when we die, we die. We're all specks. In a hundred years, we won't mean anything to anyone. Nothing around us will exist. Ants on a balloon. Floating. Nothing we do remains."

"Yeah," Poonam replies,                    "I s n ' t   i t   g r e a t?"

In that hot second, Poon turned my perspective upside-down, and it has remained that way. My biggest fear was her biggest relief. 

The realization that you can't do everything, it's not depressing. It's a fact. All it means is that there's just too much awesome stuff, too much worth seeing, too much worth doing, too many people worth meeting. 

And that thought, well it just makes me subliminally happy.

Profitez-bien, tout le monde, de tout ce que tu peux et de tout ce que tu veux.

Poonami—thanks for always making me walk on my head.




And it goes on... Things that have reminded me of this post and this feeling. I think it is important to collect them here in the spirit of revisiting our thoughts because realizing something once is sometimes not enough:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH7YxbuZQs8

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/21/135508305/the-sad-beautiful-fact-that-were-all-going-to-miss-almost-everything?sc=nl&cc=es-20110424

Mamaçita

First things first: when I refer to Mamaçita, I am speaking about my host mama. I didn't really know what to call this woman who is such an integral yet etheral part of my Strasbourg-ian life. Madame, Mère d'acceuil, host mother, "Mom"—None of these options caught my fancy.

Thus...Mamaçita. A little spicy, a little out of the ordinary, but you know it means Mom.

Mamaçita reminds me of those sourpatch candy commercials. Except with Mamaçita, first there's spunky. She's a feisty mushroom hunter and minority rights activist and, at the same time, someone who will greet you in the morning with a bag of fresh-made beignets in case you get hungry at school.

Over breakfast one morning, Mamaçita and I discuss our mutual liking for potted plants (They really do add a certain something.). That same night, I walk into my room to find...

Quelle plante!

...a gigantic plant, almost a midget tree, sitting happily on my desk. How she even got it up all those stairs, I shall never know. It made me happy. The kind where you just stare and smile and sort of chuckle to yourself.

Mamaçita also happens to be a mind reader.

Right when you're thinking "God damn, I hate space heaters" she hands you a big wooly sweater she found in the back of her closet and thinks you might like. Whenever you're about to get homesick, she makes lentil soup almost identical to your mom's daahl. When FoodPornDaily gives you the most serious of hankerings for a juicy hamburger topped with—your favorite—guacamole, she of course has already prepared a dinner of beef cutlets with fresh grain bread and avocado.

She's the sneakiest and most mysterious type of mind-reading Mamaçita.

As someone who can easily get irritated when around the same person for too long, I stand amazed at Mamaçita's ability to just...be. You don't get angry at Mamaçita. You don't get tired of Mamaçita. You don't tolerate Mamaçita. You love Mamaçita and you're pretty sure Mamaçita loves you.

Mamaçita often repeats one expression : « Chacun a sa propre façon. »—everyone has their own way. Mamaçita does not judge. She sees, she comments, and she accepts. Things that bother me about others do not bother her because she simply accepts difference. She comes into a relationship knowing that you are who you are for completely legitimate reasons and that you are bound to be different from who she is.

Beignets on French mornings

Yesterday morning, I woke up early to make beignets with Mamaçita, a plan we had made the previous night. As she cooks, she explains the tricks of beignet-making.

1. Use the zest of one complete lemon. Not the juice.
2. Make sure the dough is always near heat.
3. Thinner is better. Trust me.
4. Dip your thumbprint into the raw beignet just before laying it in the oil. It makes it fluffy.
5. Cover them for one minute after you put them in.
6. Make a lot.

We rolled the dough, cut and shaped, fried, and then sprinkled sugar and cinammon, eating as we went, moaning and nodding at the lightness of the dough and slight tang of lemon. My brain started whirring at the potential of these little fried heaven puffs. I told her about how we keep a pot of vanilla sugar at my house in Chicago—fresh vanilla beans left to steep in, and thus infuse, the white sugar.

« On peut utiliser le sucre à la vanille avec les beignets . . . »

« Mais, oui ! Tu voies? Chacun a ses propres secrets et il faut que nous les partagions. »

We agreed to try vanilla sugar and orange zest next time we do beignets.

Tarte Flambée. Courtesy isaveurs.com

Before that, however, we're making tarte flambée... —something different, but oh so familiar.