GRIZZLY PEAR
Another former intern just found a new job.
And a lot of other folks too.
My crowd isn’t wealthy, so resignation isn’t an option.
But the Great Reshuffle is in full effect.
Good on them.
For everyone looking, I hope they find something different.
Maybe they’ll like it. Maybe they won’t.
You won’t know until you do.
If you think its time for a change, then a change is long overdue.
Get out of the comfort zone.
Life is too short to be comfortably miserable.
As the year of the Ox transitions into the year of the Tiger, my bread has settled into another steady state. So here’s worth another update.
As for the past couple of years, I’m happily using the cast iron loaf pan, which gives a nice crust all around. Towards the end of 2021, I tried cooking two loaves at a time, but our stainless steel loaf pan doesn’t pop out the bread nearly so easily.
My recent return to the basics has continued to bear fruit with consistent success, even though the process takes a little more time.
I start by refreshing the starter. Mix 20g starter, 20g flour, 20g water and let it sit all day until happy and bubbly. Repeat again if the original starter is looking grouchy.
On to the main dough!
60g starter (previously mixed)
(a ratio of 20:80:100:2)
240g water
300g flour (currently organic brand from Costco)
6g salt
As always, I mix the first three ingredients to autolyze for half an hour and add the salt before the first fold.
Lately, I’ve started adding 40g of raisins (non-soaked). It adds a sweet tartness and makes for an out-of-this-world butter toast.
My baking tends to settle into a steady-state before something comes out of the blue to mess it all up (again). But at some point, things must finally settle down, right? Maybe this is the apotheosis of my sourdough baking?
I guess I just have to wait (and bake) to find out.
Three nights ago, I had a dream where I conducted a performance art piece airbrushing a continuous line throughout two rooms in a coffee shop. It was a strangely emotional dream as a crumpled to the floor at the end of the performance.
Two nights ago, I dreamed about ordering an espresso at a coffee shop. I was worried about how the caffeine might affect me (I haven’t had any since the pandemic started), and I contemplated whether I should wait till March because I could then claim that I had gone a full two years of eating only homemade (or frozen) means prepared by family members.
Last night, I dreamt about taxing a B-1 bomber around time trying to find the tarmac so we could take off.
I wonder if logging the dreams on this blog post is making me more likely to remember them. Is the vividness of the dreams related to a practice of recording them?
The brain is weird. Worry not, these footnotes have nothing to do with bread.
Happy New Years!
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Nonya Grenader retired at the end of last semester. The news made me contemplate my good luck with the professors I’ve come across in academia.
Colleges and grad schools are full of kids who think they are adults, so it must be a strange experience to be a real adult in this environment. On paper, the professors’ job is to cram information into these developing minds, but their best work is pointing students towards the wide richness of life.
I studied under three great professors from Berkeley. Joe Slusky attacked life and art with unapologetic exuberence. Chip Sullivan exhorted us to pursue our idiosyncratic interests. Ray Lifchez introduced us to the world of literature that I am still exploring. Those lessons have enriched my life for the past twenty years.
In Houston, I studied under Nonya in my first semester with Rice Building Workshop and in the last semester as my thesis advisor. Even though I am proud of the work we did in for this big last project, it was her bearing that left a lasting imprint after school.
Nonya carried herself with warmth and dignity, rare traits to be found in architecture programs. Her example has been a beacon as I have navigated through my career. Watching her success spared me from the temptation of trying to become someone foreign to myself. She proved that one can succeed without acquiescing to the norms of the prevailing culture.
The last time I read my thesis was when I submitted it in 2008. The glow of a previous project stays only a moment. Technical knowledge is already out of date by the time you learn it. However, managing oneself (and others) with grace is a practice to be honed every day.
I am excited that Professor Grenader will be starting a new chapter in her life. However, it is a shame that new students at Rice will not have the opportunity to work with her.
Here’s to the next woman up!
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How have your professors left a lasting imprint in life and work?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
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While scheduling this post, Petronas has not yet uploaded their 2022 Chinese New Years advertisement. Hopefully they’ll get a great one up by the time this post is published on CNY Eve.
If you’re looking for an architect for your home in Houston, you’d be well served to give Nonya a call, maybe she’ll have some free time to help out.
… and a photo.
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Thanks for reading the OPM letter! I’d love to have a conversation if you have any feedback. I hope you found some prompts to stretch your craft and relationships as a curious Owner PM.
Happy year of the Tiger!
Justus Pang, RAwwwr!
The algorithm me fed this 80th birthday celebration for Aaron Copeland at the Kennedy Center in 1980.
For 80, the dude is spry, I can’t imagine being on stage at that age. I don’t care if the adulation of the crowd is addictive. I don’t think I’ll have the energy to get out there and put up a show.
It’s also wild to remember that this event happened more than forty years ago. At the time, our elites were not shy about patting themselves on their backs in highbrow fashion. This was more than a birthday concert, it was a celebration of the century of American ascendance.
The program was properly populated his classics: the Fanfare for the Common Man, an excerpt from a concerto that sampled jazz, Appalachian Spring, and Lincoln’s Portrait. I’ve listened to them all in the past (as background music) and it was good to just sit and focus on the music for once.
However, I must admit that I watched this concert over the course of the month, one piece at a time. I can easily consume a feature-length action flick in one sitting, but I couldn’t properly ingest serious fare in one sitting.
One might blame the instant gratification of this internet age for such weakness, but I don’t think I would have ever thought to watch this concert when I was younger, pre-internet. I never disliked classical music; I just never had the patience for it. So I guess it’s a sign I can now watch a long program (piecemeal).
But let’s not get carried away – I don’t think I would ever pay real cash to sit through a concert, whether classical or contemporary. Music is good for background noise, but I don’t value it enough for attention or money – especially now that everything is on Spotify for free.
We live in wondrous times.
Unfortunately, everything somehow ties into culture war politics nowadays. One of the surprising highlights of the program came at the start of the concert when the cameras highlighted Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in attendance. The date of the concert was November 12, 1980, one week after he had lost his reelection campaign. What a contrast from the most recent election. Maybe some great music will do us all some good.
I had a short email exchange with a young architect about planning a career and finding the elusive work-life balance in our notoriously brutal profession. Here is an edited version.
Yeah, it’s good to think about a long-term career trajectory. However, my career experienced a few twists and turns – none that I could have guessed a couple of years in advance. As such, I’ve learned that the value of planning is in doing the exercise. Even though the final result will not match the pre-vision, a practice of regularly contemplating “next steps” has prepared me to quickly grab new opportunities and pursue new desires that come up.
And yes, you’re correct to worry about work-life balance. My career was supercharged when I joined a corporate firm and worked two years of regular 50+ hour weeks. The more you work, the more you learn – it’s a compounding investment in yourself.
However, this textbook career path can become a long-term trap. Study hard in your off time to pass the tests quickly. Push extra hours to get promoted to associate. Once you’ve level set long hours, the team needs you to keep it up. And it doesn’t get easier once you’re principal – now you have to make payroll.
A hard push for the first few years might be a good jumpstart for a young pro without a family, but completely devoting yourself to architecture is corrosive to your sense of self and your long-term relationships. Career success is nice, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to a better life.
So how did I avoid getting stuck on this hamster wheel? Good luck and low expectations.
Have fun sorting out your career. Who knows where your career will go! Just remember that everything (good and bad) comes with an opportunity cost. Plan regularly and stay flexible.
Every few months, I rummage through my boxes of books looking for a specific volume. I usually come out with several books to reread, which is what happened last year (even though I didn’t find the book I was searching for).
This photo book takes a journey through North America, photographing the food and waitresses (all women) along his extended road trip, taken over three separate legs.
The early 2000s was a tenuous time, having just dealt with the upheaval of 9/11 and the Iraq war. But our lives had not been infected by the smartphone and its ubiquitous internet in the pocket.
As such, Stephan foretold the incoming future. He just barely beat the trend of uploading sexy photographs of one’s meal and sharing it with the digital world.
Not that he was searching for sexy. It’s a damn shame to travel 13,000 miles in a big loop around this large continent and just eat diner food. But that’s what he signed up to do.
Sixteen years after publication, reading the book felt like entering a time capsule. Twice. Both for my initial page turn and slowly reviewing each photograph over the period of a week, reliving communal scenes from my early adulthood.
As a fan of shoddy diners, the settings are intimately familiar. However, it is strange to think that I am now older than many of the ladies whose portraits are frozen in time. I wonder what they are doing these days. I wonder if they ever ponder what happened to that strange photographer who took a portrait of the meal and of them, almost two decades ago.
After a while, it felt a bit voyeuristic (especially since the German edition is titled “Cuties and Calories”). Even so, I’ll posit this is a good book. It was definitely a great deal as a deeply discounted remainder item at Half Price Books, even worth moving across the continent for its own road trip from Houston to Las Vegas.
The book is an interesting concept, a well-executed portrait of our nation. Well worth a read.
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I’m also not very big on New Year’s resolutions. I don’t have a problem with them, but I’ve found that goal setting is an ineffectual exercise for how I work.
However, a few mantras have anchored into my brain over the past couple of weeks (to add to my growing list of mottos).
Viscously Focused
As a worker, my skills and my usage of time define my output.
Now that I’ve been at the Division for more than three years, I have the necessary knowledge to do my job. Unfortunately, I can’t create infinite time, so the next frontier is managing my time better.
Time management comes in two parts – management and execution. I’m happy with my task management system (immediate capture in my physical notebook, overall task organization in Microsoft Outlook Tasks). So the final frontier is to optimize execution, squeezing as much productivity out of my time at work.
In that endeavor, I need to increase my ability to focus. Project Managers are pulled in many directions, so whenever I get that rare clean block of time, I need to exploit it to the fullest. The colorful mantra has been reminding me to stay on track whenever my brain starts to wander.
Twenty-Thirty
With another election year coming up, I’m susceptible to getting caught up with the news. I’ll do my duty and vote, but I’m not a politician, so why waste my focus on the minutia of the political entertainment complex? Same for all the other types of news.
After spending four months sucked into the vortex of an online game, I’ve finally regained my equilibrium. Through the detox, I’ve realized that it is best to be extremely focused on the present while keeping an eye out for the distant future.
This mantra reminds me to think of the distant (but not too remote) future. Eight years is far enough to avoid capture in the ephemeral but still close enough to still feel imminent.
Stillness
On a practical note, both of the previous two mottos are pushing me to address my greatest distraction – podcasts.
Growing up, I would listen to sermons on cassette tape. When I started my career, I would listen to sports talk all day, punctuated by Thursday afternoon baseball with the San Francisco Giants. Now I’ve got the entire world in my pocket. It is too much of a good thing – especially as my work requires more and more hard thought.
Just like I culled Twitter down to elected politicians in my home district and Official State Agencies, I need to clean up my audio feed. I’m paid to pay attention, so I need to give my work my full attention.
The hard part is that I need to become comfortable with silence.
If I pull that off in 2022, then this will be a pretty damn good year.
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Have you picked up any themes, resolutions, or mantras for the new year?
Hit reply and let’s chat!
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David Epstein wrote a newsletter extolling the virtues of well-timed resolutions. As with most productivity advice, it all depends on the personality quirks of the individual.
In 2018, CGP Grey went on a drastic media fast that ultimately lasted well past a year. I’m not ready to go that far, but I find his quixotic “Project Cyclops” inspiring.
We celebrated New Year’s Eve by watching the Times Square ball drop on the Roku TV while simultaneously streaming the Smithsonian Panda Cam Live Stream on the iPad. Once it was over, 9 pm Pacific was the perfect time to usher the kids to bed.
… and a photo.
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Thanks for reading the OPM letter! I’d love to have a conversation if you have any feedback. I hope you found some prompts to stretch your craft and relationships as a curious Owner PM. See you soon!
Justus Pang, RA
The dates are now, the technology is anachronistic, its dystopic urban landscape never materialized, but these short stories still feel real and urgent.
College was a foreign world before smartphones or wifi, so Gibson’s landscape seemed merely a couple of left turns from being real. Our inner cities had not yet become the playground of the wealthy and the tech in his stories was more advanced than what we had on our desktops.
Two decades have passed and his dystopia still seems frighteningly close to happening. We have much cooler toys in our pockets, but are we that far away from societal collapse? Even more terrifying is the threat of chaos, we’d now be backsliding into a dark age of decreased technological capacity.
Progress is not inevitable, and my adulthood has straddled this book portending a future in both directions. Who knows where the future will land? Ultimately, the accuracy of his future-present is irrelevant. Gibson’s genius is in excavating our shared humanity within the heart of these tales.
The enduring core of these stories is anchored in Gibson’s wistful tone. A more sophisticated reader would find this maudlin tone offputting, maybe too cute by half. Then again, I wasn’t very sophisticated in college when I first read this anthology and I’ve only softened up over time.
My wife toasted a pan of sesame seeds to grind into a paste (which goes great with jam on toast).
She mixed the seeds with a spoon to speed up the cooling and left the pan on the dinner table to cool.
While playing around after dinner, the boy climbed onto a chair and grabbed a spoonful to taste.
I saw him put the spoon in his mouth and sqauwked loudly to keep him from dipping the now-dirty spoon back into the seeds.
He’s quite sensitive to being reprimanded and immediately started bawling.
When my wife went up to him, he was blubbering about not wanting the spoon on the table.
There’s a certain measure of truth to his complaint. After all, he couldn’t have misused the spoon if it wasn’t there in the first place!
We took down the tree yesterday, marking our official end of 2021.
I had wanted to take it down on the first, but the kids lobbied an extra day, but we got sidetracked on Sunday and it was suddenly bedtime.
Same for Monday. So I was going to take it down myself that night, but the kids insisted on being part of the process.
So we took it down on Tuesday morning. I put on the Peanuts Christmas album in the background and we enjoyed our last party of the holiday season, taking down the ornaments, lights, and tree, punctuated by a breakfast halfway in between.
A mundane event; a punctuation for the passage of time. I’ll get maybe ten more of these with my daughter (if she doesn’t grow out of it before heading off to college).
2021 was again a strange year, but with the kids growing up fast, I suspect every year will be unique, whatever “normal” we settle into.
So here’s to the next strange year. Let’s hope we make the most of it.