1. I am a graphic designer who is at least technically colorblind. At least, I am an anomalous trichromat — my RGB retinal sensing cones are deficient at certain wavelengths. This has caused me to find many tricks and runarounds in my professional career, and to always ask for second opinions to validate my choices. The eyedropper tool and color-slider tools, for example, are indispensable, as are Pantone color swatches, color-correct viewing booths, densitometers and spectrometers, all in which my studio is invested. I’ve also gone to great lengths to learn CMYK values for pleasing skin-tones and found great sources for validating (and refuting) my color palette hunches. By using raw numbers, in some ways I’ve been able to take greater control over color: I can ignore some of the messages my brain is sending me and look at the cold, hard numbers. CMYK press-okays still make me a little nervous if I’m going for pleasing flesh tones.
2. My favorite smells are: vanilla, bacon (especially upon waking up), oxidized patchouli, cold-morning campfires built the way I was taught (struck matches, cedar kindling or fatwood, oak logs, burning newspaper), linseed oil, the perfume-scented letters from my first real girlfriend, coffee, that creosote kerosene two-stroke engine oil smell of Six Flags over Texas coasters, the first scent of Colorado’s rarified air heading north on I-25, johnson & johnson's no more tears shampoo on an infant's fuzzy head, the sickeningly sweet smell of the gun oil my father used to clean his rifles, and the gasoline smell in “a well used garage” to quote steve baliko. This past summer I thought of one more smell worthy of the list, but promptly forgot it.
3. Every time Amy and I are saying good-bye to our house guests at the end of a dinner party, home-group or get-together we have this longstanding tradition: when the last house guest leaves and we close the front door, we look at each other and quote Miracle Max and Valerie from The Princess Bride. One of us will say, “Think it'll work?” Then the other says, “It’d take a miracle” — before smiling and waving “bye” back towards the closed door. We’re quite convinced no one has heard us do this yet, although we’ve been doing it for years. If we’re in a good mood, we’ve been known to continue quoting other lines from the movie while slow-dancing in the silence of the living room.
4. In general, I could care less about cars. I can’t identify them and they don’t inspire me. My son, however, is nuts about cars.
5. I love puppets and was profoundly enchanted by Jim Henson’s work. I’m a really good puppeteer. I can coax emotions out of puppets and keep a crowd engaged. I am good at syncing their mouths with speech, and I cringe when puppeteers fail to do so.
6. I hate sweating and have ordered my life around the avoidance of physical labor. I’m lazy when it comes to physical exertion. I have no athletic bone in my body.
7. Many of my friends don’t know that I’m a songwriter. At least, I was a songwriter. About the time I turned 14, I had come to the end of a five-year run taking classical guitar lessons — I had grown impatient with practicing, and as the sheet music had grown increasingly filled with little dots, I grew more and more overwhelmed and panicked at the thought of mastering difficult music. But I took my inherited knack for rhyme, meter, and melody, and combined it with some learned theory and wrote music pretty seriously for ten years — from age 15 to 25. I recorded demo tapes in high school, two multi-track cassette releases of original material in college, helped friends produce their demo tapes, and even released a CD in 1994. Then, much of my urge to compose waned as I focused on married life and a career in graphic design.
8. I love roller coasters. Before San Antonio’s Fiesta Texas theme park was first open, I knew about the all-wooden Rattler roller coaster they were building because I worked in USAA’s Corporate Communications department at the time. See, USAA’s Real Estate Company owned La Cantera and were partners in the Fiesta Texas development. In my internship there, we would get a daily briefing of local and national newspaper headlines that mentioned USAA; for this reason I was able to keep up with the roller coaster developments. One day a friend of mine in USAA’s PR department asked someof us if we’d like to be in a photoshoot for the theme park. Long story short, we got to be the first ‘civilians’ to ride the Rattler, and I had the pole position: the first civilian in the first seat of the first car, first run.
9. I had my own radio show in college called Paul’s Basement. That’s right, for one semester in the fall of 1991, I was a disc jockey at Baylor’s campus radio station, 107.1 KWBU-FM. My show was a fairly unchained format — I played a lot of alternative, west coast 80s Christian music — and the show ran at an obscure time slot: Sunday nights from 10PM to midnight, when we were supposed to go off of the air. Our FCC license required us to power down and then up again at 6am. About halfway into the semester I found out from some people at the station that one could power-down, wait ten or fifteen minutes, and then power back up again and keep broadcasting as late as you wanted. It was a line-of-sight antenna that broadcast 40 miles into the neighboring communities around Waco, Texas; I had a few diehard fans who would regularly call in with requests.
10. I am a fraternal twin. My only sibling — my brother Mark — and I were born on May 21. People say Mark and I have the same telephone voice. Mark and I are both introverts who perceive the other as being the more extroverted one. Mark and I both have facility with language and writing; we were both journalism majors at Baylor. I played guitar, he played snare drum. He was manager of the high school basketball team; I have no athletic bone in my body. As teenagers, Mark saved most of his money and bought a car; I spent most of my money, typically on dates. I think we both have good senses of humor, though he’s the more gifted comedian. I’m pining for us to live closer together.
11. Camptown Races, Five Miles Long: My only “stupid human trick” is my brain’s unbidden ability, when listening to conversation, to subconsciously pick up on phrases that contain seven metered syllables — when I hear them, I instinctually respond with “—doo-dah, doo-dah…” I remember my high school American history teacher giving a lesson — maybe he said “Alexander Hamilton” or “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern” or something similar, and without knowing what I was saying, I blurted out “—doo-dah, doo-dah…”. I think I got in trouble for that one. I keep the “doo-dahs” to myself, now. Occasionally, once I’ve shared this with a group, say, at a dinner party, people try to ‘catch me’ the rest of the night. It gets annoying. And yet, here I am again, sharing it with you. Once in a blue moon my brain will set phrases with eight syllables to Ode to Joy, but I’m hoping that’ll pass.
12. I have very strong ties to my hometown and to the idea of home. Not just my literal house, where I’ve made my life with my wife and kids, but to any work of literature where a character’s longing for home is a major theme. I’m more likely to tear up when a character arrives at home — or is torn away from home — than for any other reason. Probably for this reason, I can never imagine living anywhere but San Antonio. After nearly forty years of learning the back streets and short cuts here in my hometown, of learning where to find the little hard-to-find restaurants and learning the waitresses’ faces — it’s comforting in a way knowing that in one lifetime or a dozen, I’d never be able to master a single city, since the city is always changing.
13. Similarly, I have deep feelings toward the home in which I grew up. When I go visit my parents I always try to walk down into the back yard, back to the creek, to have a good look around, charting what has changed and what has remained the same. many of the boulders in the creek bed are unmoved, but sediment and smaller rocks have dramatically moved even though the banks of the creek are relatively the same. the old trail across to the field that's on the other side of the creek is overgrown, and a newer trail, started in the last ten years or so, is now the dominant footpath. The shady canopy of oaks and elms, the St. Augustine grass, my mom's planting area — it reminds me of the wonderful childhood we had.’
14. Micro-housing fascinates me. i've posted before on my fascination with micro-housing. it stands against excess. it's quaint and comforting. safe. it's cool. minimalist and distilled. womb-like. every small house presents a good design problem. it eschews the tendency to amass possessions. a prophetic voice against "bigger-is-better" consumerist bent in me and for that reason, it also interests me as a follower of Christ. as an artist, these Lilliputian sheds interest me as potential statements of beauty. and the spiritual introvert in me loves daydreaming about the monastic possibilities. i've dreamed of an art space / cell for years that would be like this. possibly something like the art silos in downtown san antonio. equally interesting to me are are treehouses and teardrop trailers. homes and mobile homes like these are, in my mind, testaments to good space allocation, a (relatively) conservative use of resources, and a rather romantic way to bunk down for the night. i've enjoyed reading about building one's own teardrop trailer, and if i were more handy with tools i'd certainly have it on my list of things to do.
15. I started my life as a United Methodist at a church that in hindsight I now realize was an amazingly wonderful place for spiritual formation. It thrived amidst a healthy tension between proponents of the kingdom-gospel of social action/justice and proponents of the evangelical substitutionary-atonement brand of gospel. As a young child in the 1970s, I learned from hippy-trippy left-of-center, guitar-strumming Jesus movement folks, and from conservative biblicists doing walks-through-the-Bible. I was informed by a mixture of Christian humanism in the pulpit, social justice in the youth group, heavy-duty bible study, classical teachings in confirmation class, well-meaning lessons from Sunday school, and life lessons like building homes and delivering Christmas presents to our needy friends. I learned about the beauty of liturgy. I learned about good music. I learned about high church and low church; I learned at retreats on the lake and I learned from my church friends’ parents as well.
16. The day I visited Birkenau in 1987 — the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during World War II — will remain one of the most poignant days of my life; of this I am sure. We had been staying in Poland and took a day-trip from our home base in Wroclaw to tour the extermination camp on our way to Krakow. To this day, I don’t know if the tour affected my traveling partners in the same way. Touring the concentration camp, and coming face to face with some of the worst humanity has to offer hit me quite hard. If I imagine a timeline of my life, that day provided a new vector-point — I think that’s where I lost much of whatever innocence remained in me. Some part of my interior turned to the off position when I walked back out of the main gate.
17. I try to live in the now and have great difficulty in doing so. In the past three or four years I’ve met some wonderful people who have shed light on the importance of living in the present moment, deeply listening to others, tending to the needs of the hour, and neither worrying or pining. I often find myself dwelling in the past — whether it is replaying the mistakes of the immediate recent past or taking refuge in or romanticizing memories from my distant past. If I have a forthcoming deadline, I can shift and think about the future, but typically only the immediate upcoming future. I am fairly certain most people think about and plan for (and save for) the future in ways that seem to me like speaking a foreign language. Instead I tend to line up potential eventualities in an artistic or quasi-orderly way, control them in the present, and then wait for them to unfold. And yet, I am a control freak in the here and now. I frequently wonder about how or whether old friends, relatives, girlfriends, co-workers, and even enemies remember shared painful moments, wonderfully creative moments, sublime moments, or silly moments. My mind hangs onto pictures and feelings surrounding moments of pain and embarrassment and fear and adolescent love and lust and young adult jealousy and rage, but my mind does not hang on to dialogue very well. I trade in words and pictures for a living, but only the pictures seem to remain. People love to say they live their life with no regrets. I have regrets. Bridges I never would’ve burned. Hateful things I never would’ve said. Apologies stacked up in my mind in case I run into certain people, years later.
18. I love good, quality typefaces, and would love a second go at life as a type designer or type compositor for a working letterpress. I love good architecture and would love a second go at life as a residential architect. I love good music and would love a second go at life as a composer, arranger, disc jockey, or full time musician. I love art and would love a second go at life as a fine artist, outsider-artist, hobo artist, sculptor, performance artist or muralist.
19. I am still amazed and challenged by the gospel of Jesus Christ and could — and god-willing will — spend a lifetime looking at its distinctives, messages and calls from different angles.
20. I believe in the idea of humanity being created in the image of a creator God and believe that through the act of creating (scribbling, drawing, singing, cooking, photographing, building community, procreating, and then sharing creations with others) we experience some of what God is. I get paid to create and am really proud of the design staff I’ve helped to assemble at his studio, and get to participate in a lot of creativity there. I can be controlling at times because I can picture the end product in my head and is impatient when others can't see it just yet. I want you to trust me that the end is going to be really cool. I like engaging at work and on my blog but also need time off to recharge, to be creative just for myself instead of others, and to fulfill my wanderlust for undiscovered places and cool artifacts along the way.
21. I always have a lot of metaphoric plates spinning on sticks and keep a lot in the air at one time. At any one time I may be deeply engaged in a blogpost, working overtime for a deadline at work, cultivating a storyline, painting a painting, etc. Sometimes it’s too much. I recognize this, but refuse to simply classify this as either a flaw or cause célèbre. There’s an imperfect art form wherein one can have their cake and eat it too. Sometimes this trespasses into gluttony, a sin of which I am frequently guilty; but as Tim Booth once gloriously sang, “why be a song when you can be a symphony?”
22. I spend a good amount of money on — and no doubt gain a lot of weight from — the practice of regularly eating lunches out with friends or grabbing coffee to catch up with acquaintances and trade stories with new friends. I love this part of my life. I’m enough of an introvert that it drains me, but I love rather have ten or twelve good lunches a month with amazing, intelligent, thought-provoking people than stay svelt by brown-bagging it.
23. I go in creative cycles: I’ll draw or paint for a month or so, then put it down completely in exchange for composing music or writing poetry or reading voraciously; but those too shall cycle out, and I’ll return to them several times within a year. Right now, for example, I’ve set aside my focused painting (from October through my show in December) and picked up guitar-playing and photography again. It’s been a long time since a book has grabbed my attention.
24. I’m proud of my four creative, articulate, sensitive children; proud of their creativity and sense of fairness; proud beyond their abilities. Proud that they have a real questioning spirituality and don’t just have a litany of canned answers. They’re more interested in what is true and beautiful than what is dogma.
25. I had a large rock collection as a kid and knew a lot about geology. The high point of every Colorado vacation was sawing open a geode at Dick’s Rock Shop in Estes Park, Colorado. I owned a rock tumbler and subscribed to Rock & Gem magazine.
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