Weblog

It’s snowing right now. Or raining. Depends on the hour. It snowed last night so Shane and I built a terrain park in our front yard; drop, rail, quarter pipe and everything.

Now it’s really windy, and our terrain park is pinwheeling through the neighborhood along with garbage cans and a Volkswagen Fox. The wind is blowing towards the shooting range, so all our stuff will probably get caught in a tree and people with shotguns will have to get it down for us. In case you didn’t know, that’s the best way to get stuff out of trees. Shotguns. It works on pinecones, coconuts and a Volkswagen Fox.

I wonder how the chickens across the street like all this wind. I would wager they don’t. I would also wager that they don’t care that they don’t, being that they’re all chickens and all. They’re not all chickens, though. They are roosters too. Sometimes when the weather is nice the neighbor will let the chickens play outside. Sometimes when the weather is nice the chickens will escape and run around the neighborhood. Sometimes when the weather is nice the roosters will crow in the morning as I get into my car, and I will laugh because I think it sounds funny.

But tonight the weather isn’t nice. Tonight the weather is pulling the chickens and the shingles off the roof, and sending them into the field. Most of our stuff is probably in the shooting range, but the other stuff is in the neighborhood that they’re building right next to our neighborhood. You see, that’s the thing about neighborhoods. They’re never done. There’s a vacant lot across the street with all sorts of hardware and junk and machinery, and that’s where most of our terrain park comes from. That’s also where the neighborhood kids build jumps out of dirt and hit them with their bikes and break their wrists.

The kids that break their wrists don’t live in the neighborhood that they’re building right next to our neighborhood. They’re still building that one. They’re still exploding stuff in that neighborhood. They come by our house during the day to warn us that they’re going to be exploding stuff, and they say that they’ll be exploding stuff until they finally get an explosion that’s in the shape of a neighborhood. They come by to warn us but we’re never home because we usually work.

I say usually, because sometimes we take time off from work for certain things. Sometimes we take time off because we were snowboarding and we dislocated our shoulder doing that. Sometimes that happens. It didn’t happen to me, but it happened to someone. She’s doing okay now, but her left arm is slung up and out of commission for six to eight weeks. She’s getting kind of bored with movies and TV and she tries to read, but reading makes her fall asleep. She falls asleep instead of reading, but when the explosions wake her up all she wants are coloring books.

Her name is Erin and she’s a very nice girl and she deserves coloring books. She didn’t even get a chance to play in our terrain park before it got blown into the trees. When you see her, please wish her a speedy and colorful recovery. If you don’t see her, you can wish her well right here and I will make sure that she knows. She’s afraid of clowns, though, so if you get all fancy when you wish her well please no pictures of clowns.

That’s it. I will make good on existing commitments, but I am totally over web design. I’m done. No more.

I quit.

Let me explain. Last September, I wanted nothing more but to work in the web design industry. To that end, I spent my fall covering the world with resumes, and I never heard a single response. Not one. Convinced that I was pursuing a dead end, I shifted the entire focus of my life and became a snowboard instructor instead. Fate never gives you what you want when you look her straight in the eye, but if you dance around the subject long enough you’re bound to end up with what you want. Or what you deserve.

In January I picked up a job working as, of all things, a web designer. It was one of those things in life that catches you completely by surprise and kicks you in the gut. You’re coasting along in one vein, convinced that you have a pretty good idea how the next season of your life is going to play out, and suddenly everything changes shape. You spend the entire autumn scampering around for a rake, and when you’ve all but given up the search you take one more step, and it flies up and hits you in the face.

That’s what this job was. I had all but sworn off my dreams of becoming a real web designer, when all of a sudden along comes the perfect opportunity. In the past eleven months I’ve probably built thirty websites. Every one is different. Some are better than others. Some more attractive than others. Every one embraces the web standards approach.

When I arrived on the team, the company I worked for had no standards for how it implemented a website. You see, when I say I’ve built a couple websites, I mean quite literally that I built a couple websites. I didn’t design them. The designers do that. I didn’t program them. Our scripters do that.

What my job has been (at least, after I crawled out of software support hell) for the last eleven months is something one might call design implementation. I take the beautiful Photoshop comps that our contracted designers cooked up, and I make them work as a website. I don’t have input on the creative aspects of the design, but I am responsible for reining in the designers when they create something foolhardy and wholly dysfunctional for the web.

I tweak certain aspects of the design so they work with our content management system. I do massive amounts of project management and modest amounts of information architecting. In the process, I have developed a set of robust standards-based HTML templates, a la CSS Zen Garden, where I can graft on just about any design using pure CSS code.

The sheer amount of knowledge I needed to possess to reach this point is mind-boggling. I have internalized every common browser quirk known to mankind, to the point where they become completely invisible in my designs. The reason I rarely use browser hacks is not because I don’t know them, but because I write my code in such a way that I can sidestep hacking situations altogether.

Whitespace parsing errors, duplicate character errors, child selector filters, star hacks, escape character hacks, box model hacks, image replacement techniques… some of these are things that are so new or so esoteric that you won’t find them in any book on web design. In some industries that would be considered bleeding edge, where techniques are so new that they’re not even documented. In standards-based web design, however, word travels fast. Anything that blazed through design weblogs a month ago is now old news.

We make it look simple. As web designers, it’s our job to make it look simple. While I have been building websites for nearly four years, my professional career as a web designer has lasted only eleven months. In the process, I’ve probably learned enough tricks, techniques, hacks and philosophies to fill five books on the subject.

And now I could really care less. The change hit me about three months ago. It was at that point I became able to implement any contracted design, for any client website, without tables. When that happened, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of my passion for the sport. Validating in an XHTML Strict environment wasn’t a problem. I had mastered just about every CSS technique I would ever need. I had mastered XHTML/CSS, so the next logical step was to start on adopting new skills. I set out to learn Linux, PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. I grabbed a stack of O’Reilly books and started digging in, ready to learn something new.

What I actually learned surprised me. I found that I had no interest whatsoever in picking up these skills. The books didn’t fill the void left by the mastery of XHTML/CSS. I was shocked when I came to the realization that this was not the direction I wanted to go. Shocked. What was up with that? I have an endless thirst for knowledge, and I had only mastered a small fraction of the world that makes the internet work.

What did I feel I had to lose in learning these new skills? A better understanding of scripting, hosting and databases would go a long ways in making me a better web designer. Didn’t I thirst for continual growth? Why the sudden resistance?

And then, I knew. I remembered. I never got into web design as an end. I don’t enjoy websites for the sake of websites, computers for the sake of computers, or code for the sake of code. I got into web design one cold January night in 2001. I had a crisis of faith regarding my major in jazz studies, which set forth a chain of events that resulted in my becoming a writer. I needed a place to quickly and easily publish my thoughts, so in February I started a website named Cromlech.

I wanted a website not because I wanted a website, but because I wanted a place to publish my thoughts. I taught myself web design not because I wanted to learn web design, but because I found that the knowledge made it easier for me to manage my writings. I studied web standards not because I wanted to sleep with the King, but because the approach saved me time and agony, and because I strongly believe in the standards-based philosophy.

Web design has always been the means, and I never should have allowed it to become the end. In hindsight, I am glad that I chose this path, or else I may never have recognised the path that I wanted to take in the first place. I should have realized that something wasn’t right when the means began to consume nine of my precious hours a day, five of my precious days a week. My coding skills grew incredibly quickly under those conditions, and I can only hope that I can find a similarly intense environment for honing skills that I value more than web design.

I will quit web design now. I will start wilderness training in June. I will continue writing always.

This search term absolutely stunned me for a moment. Here were three of my most favorite things in the world, aesthetics, the northern lights, and the philosophy of David Hume, spun together in an awkward search pattern whose actual meaning is altogether inconceivable.

For me, aesthetics do not merely imply visual appeal. Aesthetics soak into the very depths of human existence, emotion and passion. I revel in things that I find beautiful, but at the same time I am fascinated by things that I think may be good, but I am unable to comprehend. Above anything else I prefer the mental challenge of things that I cannot understand, and this scales into all facets of my life.

I love listening to the esoteric avant-garde jazz stylings of Happy Apple, which to the untrained ear (or even the schooled ear) sounds like a triad of mayhem. My recent trip to San Francisco, my first major excursion into a large city in many years, reminded me that I am simultaneously repulsed and attracted to the perfumed breath of big cities. I love open air and the outdoors, and will pick up just about any hobby that gives me an excuse to disappear into the woods. My love for both the city and the wilderness grow from a shared kernel. I live for the thrill of exploration, whether it is in the company of one or millions.

Aesthetics do not merely relate to good taste in the arts, but are a philosophy of life. It’s about absorbing your surroundings, trying to make sense of them, and then tossing yourself into completely new surroundings in order to comprehend those as well. It’s not an ideal, but a journey. Aesthetics are not an end, but a method.

I spent four years living in Duluth, and during those years my skin absorbed the aurora borealis many, many times. The most memorable experience was one early spring, upon our return from a week-long road trip to Zion. It was late and dark, and as we crested the hill and began our descent into the glimmering lights of Duluth, we looked to the sky and saw a spectacular display of the northern lights.

A full quarter of the sky was taken up with a glistening chandelier of light, morphing and pulsating its long white crystals in pace with the Earth’s magnetic field. We were finally wrapping up our 30 hour drive back from Utah, and the entire experience, from the natural light show to the bitter cold to the mental fatigue, was ethereal.

Now, David Hume, as I recall, didn’t write extensively on aesthetics or northern lights alike. Hume is known as the English philosopher who pushed empiricism and skepticism to its logical limit, and ultimately admitted that if empiricism is indeed the only way that we can come to know the world, that we must deny the existence of everything beyond our immediate perceptions. Hume was ruthless in his adherence to empiricism, refused to make concessions that previous empiricists were willing to make, and in so doing he proved that it was logically foolish to assume that empiricism was the source of all human knowledge.

However. While Hume was indeed willing to accept all the philosophical fallout that resulted from a strict adherence to empiricism, he was also a jovial fellow. While philosophy was indeed a great passion of his, he didn’t let his observations and conclusions pine away his existence. Nay, Hume was known to have partied it up with Ben Franklin of all sorts, frequent the local pubs, and pull the serving girls down into his lap. Hume freely admitted that he drew a line between his actual experience of the world, and what his philsophies told him. I greatly admire the man both for his incredible work in the realm of philosophy, and his ability to keep on living in spite of his cynical (though indeed inevitable) conclusions. Hume’s consistency in empiricist philosophy was matched only by his remarkably human nature.

I’m not sure what all this means, but I am certain of one thing. If in six months I am still working as a full-time web designer, with no end game in view, I will be seriously troubled. Self-reflection has revealed to me that I got into web design not as an end, but as a means to another end. There are far more things on this wide blue Earth that I enjoy more than web design, kiteboarding and snowboarding being a few of them, and writing another. Writing was the catalyst that led to web design in the first place, and I wouldn’t mind getting back into it.

Web design has gone limp for me. I need to experience fresh challenges, and this path is beginning to feel dangerously like one of inevitability. It is time that I pause to reflect, and remind myself that I am not a man of inevitability.

My brother-in-law is a crafty fellow. He is ever so crafty, so when my sister and him learned that they were expecting, they wanted to break the news to my parents in a crafty way. My parents are lovely folk, but craftsmen they are not. Often Tyler will perform an Amazing Feat of Mental Agility and it will be completely lost on them. This is to no fault of their own, of course, as they aren’t used to dealing with crafty underlings. Whenever one combines Tyler’s feats with my parents, however, the result is often humorous.

An example would have been during my sister’s wedding ceremony, when Tyler asked for the bride’s parents’ approval for the marriage, and my parents completely forgot the script and just sat there staring at him. There was an awkward five second pause, after which my mother and father suddenly popped up and hurriedly spoke their lines.

But it was too late. The priest laughed, my sister doubled over laughing, the whole congregation burst into laughter. It was such a classic Petersen moment that you can’t help but smile looking back on it.

So, when it became apparent that Greta and Tyler were going to have a bundle of something-or-another arriving next summer, they wanted to break it to my parents in a clever way. Since they live a mere 250 miles from the folks (compared to my 1,700 miles), G&T were able to cook something up and play it on my parents over Thanksgiving.

So. They got my parents some Christmas ornaments for Thanksgiving presents, and told them that these would be some especially appropriate ornaments to put on the tree this year. The ornaments were storks, and since babies are not dug out of the ground or grown in vats of goo but delivered to households via stork, one would reasonably conclude that my parents, upon receiving these ornaments, would realize that the stork may be paying a visit to my sister and brother-in-law.

Well. My mother opened the gift and thanked G&T for giving them such beautiful ornaments of great blue herons. We have great blue herons all the time at the cabin! How wonderful it is that we will have great blue herons on our Christmas tree this year!

Herons. Great blue herons. Soon enough the misconception was cleared up and everyone understood what was going on, but now my curiosity has been piqued. What if their baby does indeed arrive via great blue heron? What sort of child would a great blue heron bring? Would it be a girl? A boy?

Whatever it is, all I hope is that it doesn’t have tentacles. I’m okay with a girl or a boy, but man, if that kid has tentacles, I’m going to have a real tough time being uncle.

And so another Turkey Day TO THE MAX comes to pass. As with last year, I spent the day with my mountain friends Shane and Erin, the only difference this time around being the minor detail that we all live in the same house.

Well, I suppose there were a lot of differences. This year we’re living in Erin’s brand spankin’ new house in a nice neighborhood of angry dogs and ADHD children, across the street from goats and chickens. Our new kitchen has tons of counter space, which was incredibly useful when it came to making homemade rolls, pumpkin pie, mud pie, mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey and three gallons of stuffing. I had to chop up five yellow onions for the stuffing, and the little fellers were so vicious that I needed to wear ski goggles to keep my face from melting.

My old roomie Erik the Great came over, bearing a lean an’ mean green bean casserole. As we stuffed ourselves silly we tossed out quips from Blazing Saddles, Invader Zim and all that, followed by long periods of silence as everyone focused on eating as much food as possible. After the meal everyone crashed hard, really hard, and we all dozed off on the couch watching Smallville and Mission Impossible.

Erik took off shortly thereafter, as he had to be up at 3:00 the next morning to open up his coffee shop for the 4:30 rush of professional shoppers. I haven’t heard from him since, so I will assume that he drowned in a human sea of bargain-seeking violence. Quite a shame, too, cuz he was a neat kid. I’ll never forget the stories… the one about being attached at the neck to an albatross, or the one about an apple at the end of an heron.

An blue heron.

Which is another story. An different story altogether.

This one goes out to Dave Adams, a good friend and a fellow Spontaneous Combustian, from back in my good ol’ Duluth days.

A number of years ago I was rambling incoherently on my website. This was back in the days when I was still resting on a server somewhere at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and using the internet for purly narcissistic and exploitative purposes. Not much has changed since then, except that this site is now hosted in Pennsylvania. I’ve never been to Pennsylvania. I’ve never even been through Pennsylvania. I have friends in Pennsylvania, but as far as my experience goes, the state of Pennsylvania could just as well be in Cuba, or be lost under the sea, or be a really big basement in some guy’s house.

Unlike now, back then I was babbling. I was babbling and eventually I got bored with it, so I wrapped up the day’s entry with a picture of a clown. I said, “And here is a picture of a clown,” and then there was a picture of a clown.

I didn’t think much of it. It was late and I was bored and tired. But Dave “Jazz Cramps” Adams thought it was so funny that he made the clown the desktop background on a computer at work. Dave worked at the UMD Bookstore and many people thought he was a bit off, because this computer was right at the cash register, would occasionally double as the cash register, and was in plain view of anyone walking by in the hallway.

Dave and I had a tradition that we called “Friday Afternoon Loiters.” Friday afternoons were pretty dull on campus, because UMD was a school for slackers and by 10:00 am Friday most people had already left for the Twin Cities for the weekend. Thus, Dave was left working in a ghost town, under a boss that expected him to act busy up until the bookstore closed. As soon as I would get out of fiction class every Friday afternoon, I’d go to the bookstore and spoil the ruse by completely wasting Dave’s time.

Now, neither Dave nor I have a knack for subtlety, so there was no question that we were completely goofing off. I’d grab the price scanner and shoot at people walking by in the hallway. Dave would crack jokes. Occasionally I would get thrown backwards in great peals of laughter, and run into innocent bystanders. I would apologize profusely, and as soon as they were gone Dave and I would fall to the floor laughing. If the Bookstore boss wasn’t present, Friday Afternoon Loiters could last an hour. If the boss was there, we’d typically fit all our antics into a concentrated fifteen minutes of dirty looks and zaniness.

Whatever. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a Friday Afternoon Loiter, and these days I am so over clowns. I do not have any more pictures of clowns. The clowns and I are so done. No clowns.

And here is a picture of an awesome shirt: