Axoplasm❦

Orion is demonstrating a pretty remarkable memory these days. He’ll recall events of several months ago in detail, for example, or remember offhand comments about future events (“maybe Friday we go to beach?” “Geez, did we really promise that?”). Interestingly, when he talks about past events they always happened “yesterday,” but he uses random day names for future events.

Which leads me to realize Orion is entering the age when he starts to Remember. Last summer when he got stung by a bee: when he’s fifteen, that will never have happened. When he fell off his bike yesterday: he might be working that out with his therapist in 2040.

What was my First Memory? I guess it depends on what you mean by “memory.”

I very clearly remember seeing Star Wars in 1977 (at age five). That’s my earliest unequivocal memory of a distinct and singular event.

I remember several of the toys at my preschool (ages 3 to 4). I also remember making peanut butter at preschool. These are probably amalgam memories.

I remember playing “doctor” with an older neighbor girl. Actually we were playing “house” but it was really a variation of the stereotypical “doctor” game. We took turns watching each other pee in a bucket. This was probably before Kindergarten (again, age 3 or 4). (I also remember playing literal “doctor” with other neighbor girls, sometimes with the expected implications and sometimes without. But this was at older ages: kindergarten or first grade.)

I remember falling in a river in Wyoming while my parents fished. Actually I don’t remember falling in the river, I remember sitting in the front seat of our ’68 Barracuda with the heat on full blast and drinking coffee with lots of sugar and cream. I don’t know what age this would have been, probably preschool as well.

I have an impression of riding on a commercial airplane with my mother. I sat on the floor and played with my Fisher Price zoo animals. The only commercial airplane flight I took before college was from Scottsbluff to Lincoln Nebraska for the occasion of my grandfather’s funeral, in 1974 (at age 2).

I have another impression of entering the front room of a house similar in layout to my maternal grandmother's, and several grownups were seated way above eye level around the room. My impression was they were gathered. This may be a memory from the same trip: the grownups were gathered for the funeral. My parents tell me the house they lived in before 1973 had a similar layout to my grandmother’s, so this might be an earlier memory of some other event, perhaps my brother’s baptism?

What’s your earliest memory?

I have not been feeling the Drupal love lately. Drupal seems hell-bent on making my designs as difficult as possible. I thought this reflected either a technical failure on Drupal's part, or a profound lack of getting-it on mine.

This weekend I was poking through an old Django “Hello World” project that was haunting my home computer and I realized the problem has nothing to do with either Drupal the Framework/CMS or Paul the Developer/Designer. The problem has to do with the slashes in the previous sentence.

Drupal isn’t a set of tools in the same sense as an MVC framework (e.g. Django, Rails). Drupal is a set of solutions to an ever-growing set of problems. I know just enough web development to be frustrated with what Drupal wont’t let me do. If I were a more technically-limited designer I’d be amazed at all the out-of-the-box functionality. Instead I see mainly that my problems aren’t the ones Drupal solves, or that Drupal’s solutions aren’t my solutions.

Unless Drupal 7 is just balls-out magical or until my job entails 0% Drupal template coding, this problem will bug me. Add it to an ever-growing list of crap in my life I can’t change and thus need the serenity to accept.

I get “networked” a lot, especially now that I’m working at Mercy Corps (which is a really great place to work). Similarly, a lot of people come to me with leads: “do you know any Drupal developers?” That kind of thing. I’ve been joking that I should start a referral service.

I never turn away the opportunity to help someone who wants to use me for these purposes. Never. If you want to “network” me, send me an email. The address is [my first name] @ [this domain].

I get most of my work through either my reputation or through friends, and I almost never need to show off my portfolio. The more I give, the more I get in return. Not usually in a tit-for-tat sense, but maybe more generally in karmic sense. It seems that, professionally at least, I receive in proportion to what I give.

I’ve typed a lot of emails with job advice, and advice about life at Mercy Corps. I like giving advice, probably more than most people like receiving it. So, for the sake of efficiency, I’ve compiled those emails here.

Job advice for recent grads

(Excerpted from emails to recent college grads)

Spend a lot of time on fun creative projects. If you can get known for a cool website about Godzilla movies or a Banksy-style public art stunt, that gives you some name recognition. I once hired a junior designer in part because she managed several fansites. It demonstrated she enjoyed creating things, even if they weren’t related to her life as a designer. At a minimum you should blog, put photos on Flickr, and put your sketchbook online.

Make your portfolio, not your resume, the center of your job application. (Non-creatives: make a portfolio! Show off what you did not where you worked.)

Put. Your. Portoflio. Online. Blogspot, WordPress, or Flickr are fine if you don’t want to make your own website.

Apply for senior level jobs, stuff that’s way above you. I did this successfully once and actually got the job. Even if you don’t get it, someone will probably look at your portfolio. So when a junior level job opens up, they’ll be thinking of you already. I’ve been involved twice in hiring designers who applied for Art Director-level jobs. They didn’t have the experience to handle clients but they had such strong books we created positions for them.

Networking doesn’t just mean business contacts or people who will give you jobs. I look at it as socializing. Having drinks with friends is networking, if you all work in the same business.

If you have a job lead show it to all your classmates. In the long run this will serve you better than holding leads close to your chest. I have a large group of designer/developer/marketing friends. We share leads all the time and often scoop them from one another but now we are all busy all the time.

Do favors, give stuff away, show how your work is done. The Internet economy rewards sharing. Designers and marketers are lousy at this for whatever reason but programmers do it all the time and respect non-programmers who think that way.

Don’t just apply at agencies. Lots of software companies and small businesses have occasional needs for designers.

Freelance. Work for free if you have to but don’t call it that. Present a bill but discount it 100%. Friends in bands, coffee shops, dogsitting ... all those people need websites, flyers, youtube ads, whatever. Errol Morris called this the “best commercial ever made” and I think it was a side project for the filmmakers. Make something like this and people will be begging you to work for them.

Working at Mercy Corps

(Excerpted from emails to people looking for advice on whether to apply for work here)

This is the best job I’ve had after I left archaeology 11 years ago. It’s also the longest I’ve EVER held a job (three years this month.)

I work in Internet Marketing; we generate our own budget which is a key distinction from other places at Mercy Corps. I’ll describe my work environment but it won’t exactly be everyone’s work environment.

We have a crazy lean team for the size of website we have: one designer (me), one developer, one social media marketer, and two writers. We’re adding another marketer and a developer. I have daily live-to-production deliverables, often several a day. So it’s an immensely productive environment. I probably produce/deliver 3–4 times as much as I did working at agencies, dot-coms, or software shops. Despite which I somehow manage to work 8-hour days on pretty much my own schedule, and almost never late nights or weekends. (Except during a large-scale disaster like the Haiti Earthquake.)

It’s also a family-positive (downright wholesome) work environment: compared to agency life it’s OK to leave early for daycare runs and there aren’t any late-night drunkfests at the local strip club. My coworkers are mainly earnest do-gooder milk-drinker types (like me). Lots of yoga bodies, Peace Corps veterans, bike commuters and homebrewers.

Compared to the for-profit world the amount of office politics and drama is much lower. Not nonexistent certainly but there are fewer of those barriers to producing good work. Because we must meet very lean overhead standards the emphasis is almost always “will it work/is it sufficient?” not “does this satisfy some political goal?” In my group we frequently launch projects and rev them on production after they generate (internal) feedback; this is “agile” I suppose but also veers close to “beg forgiveness not ask permission.”

We have an awesome new building in a great location.

We are our own clients, so we own all our work and eat all our own dog food. We almost never launch something then walk away from it; we see everything we do every day.

All of our work is held to high ethical standards (basically: no lying) which is a double-edged sword. I believe in what we do which has a wonderful clarifying effect, and I was tired of the ethical compromises I felt I was making in for-profit marketing. But on the other hand, we are marketing and fundraising; the dollars matter. We have no product and thus no demand creation. We can only sell our story, we can’t stretch the truth, and we have a fraction the budget a for-profit marketing team would have. Programs staff (i.e. those people who work with our clients/beneficiaries) may get a “helping other people all day” warm fuzzy feeling, but the fundraising team doesn’t feel it. I’ve written elsewhere about how frustrating this can be.

Dave Moulton writes:

Pro-cycling change is happening all over the US, and I believe it is partly because of this change that the non cycling public is kicking against it; people don’t like change.

This is probably true but I think it's more than just fear of change driving anti-bike hatred. I think there's an element of cognitive dissonance or outright denial. No one thinks oil is getting cheaper; consider then that our prosperity is built entirely upon it. It's scary to confront the likelihood that our Happy Days are limited. We are entering a future where everything but physical labor will get more expensive; any contraption that makes physical labor more productive (e.g. bikes), will serve us well in that future.

Big issues like energy aside, there's a personal aspect of cognitive dissonance: living a bikey lifestyle is cheaper, easier, happier and healthier. My commute is a bike ride through the woods. It costs nothing and makes me skinnier. I have a stronger heart than men half my age, despite a steady diet of donuts and beer.

I've run the numbers on this many times. By maintaining only one car my family saves about $6000/year. I burn 2500-3000 extra calories a week. And it's fun.

From my perspective, the only reason everyone doesn't live like this is because they are cognitively blocked from imagining the possibility. I'm not athletic or tough or outdoorsy. I just ride my bike to work. I've been told to my face that my lifestyle is impossible. Impossible! How then do I live it?

If I saw someone just like me living a better life for less money ... how would that make me feel?

Update, 1:15 pm PDT

Obviously not everyone can ride their bike everywhere all the time; some people have physical conditions that prevent them from doing so.

I also don’t mean to imply that non-bikey people are lazy; for the record I think all people are lazy, just in different ways. (For example: one of the reasons I ride bikes everywhere is because they are much easier to maintain than cars. I’m really lazy about getting our car serviced.)

I honestly believe that more people would ride their bikes more often, but fail to imagine their own lives ordered in such a way that it’s easy, convenient, or pleasant.

Iris has kind of been the Big News around here the past 10 days so it’s easy to overlook what the other Souders kid is doing in that span. Stuff like: eliminating somewhere other than inside his diaper. Mastering the scoot bike. Skinning his elbow and not crying. Playing alone in his room for half an hour. Buying, and wearing — at his own insistence — a backpack, and shoes with laces. Taking showers not baths. Learning his first mildly colorful song (“I’m Popeye the sailor man/I live in a garbage can/I eat all the worms/and spit out the germs”). Swearing (“oh Geez!”)

He also insists I dress like him (same color shirts, mostly) which, I must say, has actually improved my sartorial presentation.

That’s just in the last two weeks. Maybe it’s the lack of one-on-one Mommy time; maybe I’m just a lazy parent who wants to make his son carry his own backpack; maybe it’s having a little sister; maybe it’s just his brain hit a sudden maturation phase coincidentally at the moment of Iris’ birth. I dunno.

Tantrums of course have taken a sharp upswing too, but I’m impressed at his occasional rationality. Sometimes we can actually reason him out of a tantrum. Not often, but it happens.

Parents with older kids always say crap like “pay close attention to the first years, they go so fast.” Those parents are right. A month ago we had a toddler and in a few more months we’ll have a preschooler. Our nights of cuddling at bedtime are limited.