Whelp, it's Monday. Bummer. And I have little ulcers on my tongue and a tea-scalded mouth that are making it painful to eat stuff, such as food. However, my friend Megan just sent me a link to her Hipster Bingo page which I should probably take to Spaceland with me...if I ever, ever go. That's right: For anyone likely to give a poop, I live in Silver Lake and have never been to indie-rock shrine Spaceland, which is about 100 yards from my front door. I'm just irritated by the fact that you have to use a decoder ring to figure out who is listed on their marquee, since they use a 10-letter, 4-digit plastic alphabet to spell everything. Out of coolness. Which is wrong. It is.
Reading A Fairly Honourable Defeat now, and thinking a lot about the Abbess's comment in The Bell, that all of our failures are ultimately failures in love. We love too much or too little. We love the wrong people or the right people for the wrong reasons. We love the wrong way. Does this mean that love exists always, as a kind of feature of the universe, for us to channel or redirect? Are we never completely bereft of love? Do we simply forget it exists until we are confronted with it again in the form of a person or place? Or is it born with us, created by the individual and put forth into the world? Does it miss its mark? What happens then? Does it persist? Is a failure of love the ultimate hamartia?
That fellow feeling, a sense of contentment with oneself and the world, must occur because love persists. It saturates the landscape; whether or not the landscape engulfs it entirely or allows it to settle like the first snowfall, that must determine whether we can achieve contentment...though one doesn't really achieve contentment. It seems to wash over you suddenly, without warning. At least, it does me. It's a sort of simplistic realization, and it doesn't last. But it must have stuck with St. Julian, with her "all shall be well"s.
Okay, now I just sound like a nutjob. But it was worth considering.
You can find more of the interesting word usements I structure* on Apple.com.
Read my article, Better Writing Through Design, on No. 242 of A List Apart.
Pick up issue 176 of .net magazine to read my thoughts on creating outstanding web copy.
Watch a video of the Design Eye for South By panel at SXSW Interactive 2008. Or view the slide deck at DesignEye.org.
*With apologies to Harris K. Telemacher.