works of wanderlust

Category: deeper thoughts

  • Across the Universe

    This afternoon I was driving through a snowstorm listening to a science radio show on the CBC talking about the launch of the new James Webb space telescope.

    The James Webb Space Telescope is a space telescope being jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It is planned to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s flagship astrophysics mission.

    – Wikipedia

    That programme got me thinking about how a couple weeks back I looked out across the evening sky while I was out for a walk and noted that three bright “stars” were lined up right there above me. I opened my astronomy app on my phone and oriented the navigation tool to point towards them above the horizon and realized that I wasn’t looking at stars, but instead very likely and as best as I could deduce, three planets neatly aligned just over the roofs of some neighbourhood houses.

    Looking at the sky makes me feel pretty small in the vast scheme of things, peering out into the universe and realizing that even our one little solar system in the backwater of our one little galaxy barely registers as anything but points of light in the vast inky blackness of the multiverse.

    Describe your 2021 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    I point this insignificance out because I think there are those of us who feel the reality of our smallness and rareness in the vast universe and embrace it. I also think there are others who lash out against it in ways that are indecipherable to the rest of us.

    Both perspectives emerge from that mist of confusion in many different forms representing many different things.

    For me, it emerges as rambling blog posts, art, occasionally music, and adventures through my little corner of this tiny planet.

    For others, it seems to emerge in less constructive ways. Politics, online rage, cruelty, crime, and willfully working against the general goodness that is possible in this universe.

    In the upcoming year I hope you find a way to lean into even just a little more constructiveness — for yourself, for me, for all of us — as you whirl through the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, and that you continue to enjoy my attempts at the same right here as I continue to write about cooking, travel, adventure, and filling my face with delicious foods.

  • Level Up

    I don’t write about it much (or ever really) but I enjoy the odd video game in my downtime. When I need to relax or spend time with my daughter, the controllers come out and we play. When I don’t have the mental energy for a book or for writing, I flip on the PlayStation. And I usually go in for either puzzle games or, when I’m feeling ambitious, role playing games.

    The conceit of most role playing games is experience gathering.

    The idea of “leveling up” comes from taking on the role of a character in a game who needs to practice skills or abilities over and over again as the story progresses to become better, stronger, faster, more agile, or smarter.

    Real life doesn’t often work much like a video game at all, but I do tend think one trope from the realm of digital entertainment translates quite succinctly from the real world in a way that is useful. It probably goes without saying that practicing any skill can make one better, stronger, faster, more agile, or smarter.

    What was your biggest
    achievement of the last year?

    I could make a list of all the interesting skills and abilities in which I’ve challenged myself to “level up” this past year, but one only needs to scroll through the archives of this blog to see the writings I’ve already left here about many of them.

    Instead, I’d simply suggest that the very act of trying to become a better learner, the notion of taking on new things, digging into interesting problems, tackling the unknown, and diving into literature and documentation to figure out stuff I didn’t know before, that act itself was a grand achievement of a sort.

    It is notably easier to sit on the couch and watch other people do interesting things on television.

    Heck, I often click over to YouTube and watch some other outdoorsman or culinary amature share their video blog of adventure, exploration, and investigation. It really is mindless to watch someone else cook a great dish. It is absolutely simpler to let the video run as someone else pitches a tent in the wilderness and roughs it in the winter weather while they narrate their camping trip to the camera. That’s basic.

    What is far more difficult is writing down that recipe and trying to prepare it yourself.

    The real challenge lies in conquering one’s own wilderness, be that deep in the woods or a campfire out the backdoor.

    So what is my best achievement of 2021? I don’t want to brag, but tackling some interesting challenges has definitely left me (at least a little bit) better, stronger, faster, more agile, and possibly even a little bit smarter.

  • Froze Up

    About thirty six hours before I sat down to pen this post the city where I live got hit by a small ice storm.

    I mean, technically, the weather service called it “freezing rain” but after an hour of that particular meteorological event (whatever one chooses to call it) every outdoor surface had been covered by a thin, slippery sheen of pebbled ice that sent traffic into chaos, all but shut down the city, and left people like me walking their dogs shuffling along the glassy sidewalks barely able to maintain a vertical posture.

    At lunch (when it was a bit brighter and bit warmer, but not any less icy) I took a photo of one of the boulders in a nearby park while I took the dog on yet another shuffling scoot around the same.

    It was as if someone had encased the meter-wide stone in a perfectly form-fitting layer of cold transparent glass, sealing the stone into protective, icy case visible from the outside but unexpectedly cold and smooth to the touch.

    What is your perspective on the culture of 2021?

    For some reason when I sat down this evening to write a response to my daily December question, I thought of this stone covered in ice, locked away in a little bubble of glass-like protection, visible to anyone who walks by but isolated and encased in something that prevents, at least without some kind of force, change or interaction from the outside.

    My whole world was covered in a sheet of ice for the last day and a half.

    Everywhere I look there is a slippery film that lets me look through and under and into the world beneath. But all I can do is shuffle along and feel the cold, slippery icy that separates me from what I really want to connect with.

    Funny, but the whole world — friends, family, people, everything — feels a bit like that these days, too.

  • Legacy

    I’ve never grown older before, so forgive me if you have and I’m just being obvious.

    The older I get the more I think about the balance between the entropic impermanence of all things and the human urge to continue creating and planning and hoping in the face of that impermanence.

    I think it is all twisted up in this idea of legacy.

    What excited you most in 2021?

    I thought about legacy a lot this past year, and when I paused to reflect on what gave me back some of that hope and excitement during the past twelve (give or take) months, this idea of legacy kept popping into my head.

    I’ve had no shortage of unplanned opportunities since starting a blog called “the cast iron guy” to explain my connection to that particular style of cookware, particularly since I can’t fallback to a simpler explanation such as “I sell it” (which I don’t) or “I collect it” (which my wife may argue is where I’m trending but my collection is not worth writing home about) or “I’m an expert in it” (which would be a stretch to sincerely claim.)

    As I’ve often alluded to, occasionally openly written about, this whole “cast iron guy” idea strays into a universe where I adore all things ferrous, but is actually more of a clue to an overarching philosophy of lifestyle that I’ve been trying to embrace more fulsomely: uncomplicated things, life lived, and a mindset that reflects the philosophical practicality of well-seasoned cast iron frying pan, enduring, simple, down-to-earth & extremely useful, as I write in my snippet.

    It’s also deeply entrenched with the idea of legacy.

    Instilling in my daughter a legacy tied to objects like cookware and sourdough starters.

    Building a legacy of lifestyle through travel, exploration and curiosity.

    Maintaining a legacy of worldliness and environmental stewardship.

    Leaving behind a legacy of ideology and an approach to the universe.

    I think as we get older we may not all panic about the dwindling time we have left, but in some small way many of us start putting more effort into shaping what will remain behind when that time dwindles to nothing.

    Maybe it’s imprecise to say I got excited about legacy this past year. Though it is clear that I thought and wrote and waxed poetic quite a lot about this idea of legacy, even if those thoughts were not strictly labelled as such.

  • Not Created Equal

    Not all websites are created equally.

    Take this site. As a real estate analogy, this is a cabin in the woods. This blog is the digital version of a weekend getaway, stuffed with comforts and curiosities, eclectic bits of cookware, and eccentric tchotchkes piled onto the shelves to add an atmosphere of warmth while still giving it all a human touch.

    What made your job
    interesting in 2021?

    On the other hand, the website that I oversee for work is a large glass-paneled government skyscraper downtown, with elevators speeding between the floors and strict rules for how the queues to each service desk are designed, and careful attention to detail given to the colors of the wall paint and the placement of the signage pointing out everything from the washrooms to the lost and found to the exit.

    I don’t write about my work, at least not often, because there is such a stark contrast between what I am paid to build over there and what I build for fun over here.

    And I think buried in that explanation is a little of what makes my job interesting, too.

    Not everyone understands websites, and less so do people understand the vast chasm of differences that are buried beneath the design, purpose and function of those websites. Maybe that is a broad assumption, but I see evidence of such a conjecture if not daily, then multiple times per week.

    We need to think more like Starbucks. Someone will say.

    I reply that Okay, yes… we can learn from Starbucks but Starbucks is a little shop on the corner that sells coffee and fills its humbly lit spaces with warm, inviting leather chairs and groovy popular jazz. We are required to use plastic seating and provide ample lighting. How can we translate that vibe into something useful?

    The analogy breaks down quickly, obviously.

    People see something that works and while they are not wrong in the simplification, they are also often unaware that there is a huge gap — technically, functionally, even philosophically — between what our corporate website does versus what Facebook does versus what that food delivery app does versus what a little blog in the winter wilderness (quietly run by one and the same person as the first) is meant to be… and do… and say.

    And in that they are not wrong but merely interested in a design problem, the part of my job that becomes interesting in return is attempting to take the energy of such a vision and translating it into a plan for someone else to write code that can be uploaded and integrated and activated into a tool that, say, sells bus fares with the same fluidity that Starbucks dispenses lattes.

    Meanwhile, I can write and say and post and design this little cabin in the wilderness exactly the way I want to. Right here. Warm, cozy, curious, and inviting.