May 2012
7 posts
Semester at Sea: Embarking the MV Explorer For The... →
Second post. Our photographer Rafael Aguilera shot a nice photo essay about the students’ first few hours on the ship and I wrote a delightful introduction.
Semester at Sea: The Short Term 2012 Voyage By The... →
I wrote our first post yesterday. That was the easy part, the hard part was where I played graphic designer for a day and made that infographic.
Semester at Sea: The Short Term 2012 Voyage By The Numbers
It's a concept I'm only vaguely familiar with.
Our 259 college students arrived at the ship today, fresh faced and and oddly mostly dressed in athletic gear. The main thing I learned is that sometime in my four or so years as an alleged real grown-up, college students have started looking like babies to me.
My recollection of myself as a college student was that I was super cool and confident and put together but I can practically smell the...
And this is where things became the stuff of...
I have almost no sense of Costa Rica. It’s a country I’ve spent in busses wondering what it is about Spanish greetings that causes people to reply like they wouldn’t to the same greeting in their own language and hotel casinos winning and losing hands of blackjack and breakfast at a corner table, leering at my new colleagues, suspicious of anyone so lively before at least two...
I ordered a sandwich and it came with the wrong...
I’m here. San Jose, Costa Rica. After flying all night I took an unintentional nap and woke up four hours later feeling disoriented, feverish and strangely eager. The air in my room feels impossibly still and stagnant and the condensation is thicker than anything we have stateside. I’m undeniably in a foreign land. I understand most of what I hear but can only communicate in broken,...
Precisely one half inch too tall.
Four hours into the eight hours I will spend on a plane today and I’m breaking to eat at the type of food court food that is only ever seen or found in Southern states. It’s 6 AM and there is a line at the Pappadeaux Seafood Express. I’m drinking coffee and watching it move from an uneven metal table that keeps causing my camera to tip over. Airports are for walking around with...
Seven out of ten.
I’m standing in line to get felt up by TSA and I’m already angry because seven out of ten people in line are wearing shorts and slippers for their plane rides and I’m happy to let things like that bother me because I get to feel superior. So, good start, sincerely. Context soon, but adventures ahead.
April 2012
6 posts
Old Mac of the Month: Beige PowerMac G3 →
I wrote this month’s Old Mac of the Month for 512pixels.net. If nothing else, read it to see how I worked the phrase “whether or not they were under duress when they entered this agreement, nobody could say,” into a column about an old Apple computer.
Based in equal parts on his experiences with...
As recently as several hours ago, he was completely oblivious to the fact that a blog post of his from four years prior had been plagiarized and directly copied and pasted as a chapter of the latest sexy monster teen romance novel currently being digested by literally millions of intellectually blossoming teenage girls. Moreso than outrage over the blatant stealing, he felt an unmistakable pride...
Girls, Season 1 Episode 1
Last night I watched the pilot of Lena Dunham’s HBO show, Girls. Literally every publication in the United States has written about Girls in the run up to the show’s premier. Literally every writer seems to think Dunham is the voice of my generation. And since we all know I’m supposed to be the voice of my generation, I had to watch it and have an opinion.
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Girls does an...
Caitlin's Small, Stylish San Francisco Home House... →
The home of my friends Caitlin and Eric is featured on Apartment Therapy today. I’ve slept on the floor there, it’s totally legit.
Caitlin also runs the excellent interior design blog Sacramento Street.
I will not write about Star Wars Kinect.
I had planned to write several thousand words about the tragedy of Kinect Star Wars for Xbox 360. I was going to articulate the discomfort I have with Han Solo, Lando and golden bikini-clad Leia being placed into a mini dance-game where each air humps to top 40 pop songs remixed to include Star Wars lyrics. I intended to tactically express how my childhood, my adolescence and my early and current...
March 2012
2 posts
His defining achievement was a tumblr post
At this point in his life, his defining achievement was a tumblr post that received over one thousand (1,000) notes. Most of those were reblogs, which he was especially proud of as he values those much more than likes. It wasn’t until several decades later that this accomplishment would be replaced as his defining accomplishment by another ambiguous measure of popularity on an entirely...
February 2012
7 posts
Rotund and vile.
Everyday he ate heartily, for it felt that he was making progress. The food kept him alive, what could possibly be wrong about such a situation? It wouldn’t be until many months later that he realized the food was making him fat. Rotund and vile. Undesired by the opposite sex. This would be his ultimate dilemma. Eat to live and be merry, or starve to fuck and live in an equally satisfying...
Swipe the Linen: John Vieira's Home Screen →
Thanks to Swipe the Linen for featuring my iPhone home screen today. Pretty great.
Click through and check out the site. I dig seeing what applications people use most often.
swipethelinen:
January 2012
9 posts
Seeing past solipsism to better.
Three years ago a close friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer. Somewhere between two years and six and nine months ago, his left calf was mostly removed to make sure that his entire cancerous tumor went with it. It was unclear if he’d be able to run again. Two years ago, he ran a marathon. One year ago, he ran 35 miles on mud trails. On Saturday, he biked 103 miles over snowy mountain...
Worse that it was ostensibly a movie for women
From: [Redacted]
To: John Vieira
Subject: Bridesmaids
Have you seen the movie Bridesmaids? (It’s okay to admit you’ve seen it… it’s a funny one).
From: John Vieira
To: [Redacted]
Subject: Bridesmaids
Not only have I seen Bridesmaids, but I saw it on opening night. There was a group of girls dressed up as bridesmaids and they had me take a picture of them with their tiny pocket camera. It felt...
Life Vegas
Insights and observations from a first visit to Las Vegas:
1. What is with the countless opportunities to ‘shoot a real machine gun’? I understand that Vegas is supposed to be the land of iniquity, but it just seemed sort of weird that shooting a machine gun was perhaps the main thing I saw advertised.
2. There were some extravagant things we did that I really enjoyed (hello neon...
There were no menswear blogs to bother me.
I’m about two weeks in to my four month homeowner experiment and this doesn’t have much to do with owning a home, and more about proximity, but I’m finding that one of the things I miss the most about my apartment is my walks to and home from work. I’m (probably much like you) quite good at walking without thinking about it, so I could just let my mind get all ‘first...
And then the Uncharted theme song comes on and...
And then the Uncharted theme song comes on and everything feels like it’s going to be ok. You’ll play video games in your apartment and eat secret turkey sandwiches that nobody knows about because you tell the world you are a vegetarian. You’ll download Horrible Bosses from a torrent site and watch it as an excuse to eat candy even though you can barely hear the dialogue....
At some point we will all drop our iPhones and...
At some point we will all drop our iPhones and shatter the glass on the back. For some people it will be during the first week of ownership. Those people will be upset and feel that they’ve been ripped off by Apple. In a twist of irony, they’ll curse the ghost of Steve Jobs.
For other’s they won’t break their glass until the precise midpoint between when the current...
Either glorious or kind of worn out.
I often wonder how often people think about my shoes. Probably never, but maybe once in awhile when the rest of my appearance is so put together that a person’s gaze makes it all the way past my lazy eye and crooked nose, over my rumpled shirt and unbuttoned fly, by my bulging stomach and the mustard stain on my bulge-free crotch to make it down to my shoes which are either glorious or kind...
December 2011
8 posts
He worried.
He worried about his career and his future and if he would ever fall in love with a woman enough to want to marry her. He worried about his mother when she was sick and his brother when he got fired. He worried about who would be the next president of the United States and how it would change the economy.
But most of all he worried: what if that last tweet was the best thing he would ever write?...
How to be 26
How to be 26 years old:
1. Act responsibly sometimes.
2. Act irresponsibly sometimes.
3. Feel very anxious about things you did when you were acting irresponsibly.
4. Notice your eyesight getting worse and your achilles tendons aching.
5. Keep playing video games.
Unread Message
I have this email in my inbox that refuses to be marked as read. I’ve read it probably five times at this point. In fact, it’s not even a message to me, but a tentative acceptance of a meeting I’m holding this afternoon. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to mark it as read. I’m worried about this means, both for my present and for my future. What if having a red...
Not Clooney's Pig
I went to Storybook Lane at Alpenrose Dairy with my mom for her birthday yesterday. There was a pot bellied pig kind of curled up in a pile of hay. I asked the volunteer lady if I could pet him. “No,” she said, “He’s kind of sick. One of the volunteers from yesterday fed him some chocolate chip cookies.” I was disappointed and also felt sad for the pig.
The Chris Paul Trade That Wasn't
I’ve had some time to think, and I’m much less incensed about this whole situation. Owners veto trades all the time, the weird part is how in this case it was David Stern to do it. He holds role as the league commissioner but also as acting Hornets owner, in this situation he was acting as the Hornets owner. But I’m going to post it anyway because I wrote almost 2,000 words.
It...
How to get some work done:
1. Find a good place to work
3. Put on your headphones
4. Turn off the fucking internet
5. Get some work done
November 2011
2 posts
It will hurt, but it won't be a serious injury.
If he doesn’t already, someday the rapper Unk will have children. They will play football. At some point one of them will be the recipient of a hard tackle. Their leg will be twisted awkwardly during the tackle. It will hurt, but it won’t be a serious injury. Unk will tell him that it will be ok. “Walk it out,” he’ll say reassuringly. Then everyone will have a good laugh about the whole thing.
In a line around my bedroom
I measure my life in running shoes. When my feet can feel the road too well, I get a new pair. It’s a new calendar page.
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I keep all of the old running shoes in a line around my bedroom. Each is a different color and model. Each one has something to say about where it spent its time running. Eventually they’re going to overtake my bedroom. I won’t be able to get out. I’ll...
October 2011
5 posts
Blink.
On Steve Jobs.
Photo by Diane Walker.
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When Steve Jobs died, everyone wrote something about him. Lots of people wrote about how innovative he was and how many amazing things he created. Those were good and important, but the stories I enjoyed the most were the more personal memories of Steve Jobs or the ways Apple products have somehow nudged the paths of someone’s life in one way or another. A...
Nope.
This was always
“This fucker needs a new hobby,” Michael said, unknowingly quoting Blade: Trinity. He was talking about Carl and his propensity for extremely loud and incredibly poor decision making in the form of drinking to complete and unnecessary inebriation.
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This was always going to take awhile.
September 2011
10 posts
An Increasingly Desperate Conversation With My...
(photo via woodpaneledshoes)
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Hey! How are you doing? I see you all the time but we don’t talk nearly enough. We should get some coffee and catch up. Oh, right, coffee, sensitive subject. I know, I’m sorry. - But really, I want to talk. I’ve been feeling bad. I know I haven’t treated you very well. I’ve tried, but it’s just…I really like ketchup. Yes, and...
A Look Back At When Fall Out Boy Was My Favorite...
When I was in college, for awhile at least, my favorite band was Fall Out Boy. I wouldn’t have admitted it to you then, because they were too mainstream, or poseurish, or something, for any twenty-something self-respecting forward-thinking rabble-rousing (why not?) college student to love. But I loved their music. Girls and the way they treated me or I treated them seemed like the most...
Oregon Manifest September Diary: Ziba x Signal →
I wrote another entry for our ongoing Oregon Manifest diary on Core77. Click through to read our parting thoughts. The bike is almost done, and will be shown off this weekend.