hey friends and family:

nick here. i signed up the girls and myself for a ripper of a ride on June 5 this year. i kinda swore to never return to the very poorly organized and heavily-trafficked mayhem that is the Ride for Heart in Toronto, but this year is different.

we lost our cousin Jake this past december, to a heart attack at just 25 years of age. he was healthy and generous and a great example of a human being. the planet is lesser without him. because jake had a big heart and is greatly missed, i am returning to the Ride for Heart to help raise funds in his name. typical filipino style – i’ve enlisted the participation of my entire family. i’m towing ruby for 50k, and julie is riding with jett or her big girl two-wheeler for 25k.

please feel free to peruse my donation page, or the donation pages for julie and jett. we are going big and then going home, and all assistance is greatly appreciated. greatly.

thank you again. here’s to jake and big hearts…

nick.

So, http://jesandian.com/?p=287

Nothing I’ve ever done has garnered the attention that this photo has. At this writing, the photo has almost 6,000 views and has been added to multiple groups on Flickr.

And here’s the kicker

Its popularity is driven by the hair under Jes’ arm. Did you notice that? There are people who are extremely serious about how ‘sexy’ a look this is. I like that about the world. There are people who are driven to the point of excitement by the seemingly mundane. The Internet brings that to the surface in other humans and allows me to revel in them the way they revel in my wife’s armpits.

My brother and nephew

On December 6th 2010, at 8:06am, we lost my brother Jacob. With a history of heart complications, we suspect he died of a heart attack.

I wanted this post to be an eloquent eulogy to Jacob, but find that stating the facts has left me drained and numb. Jacob died on Monday. Jacob is gone physically from our lives. He’s not coming back from the pizza shop to give me big hugs. He’s not laughing at all of us in our silly dramas and defenses. He’s not sharpening knives, growing (and killing) bonsai trees, eating candy like some people pop pills. He’s not at my sister’s watching our little nephew or teaching him his laughing samurai ways. He’s gone.

I do not know what to do right now. There is nothing I can do to change anything, but I just want to kick and scream on a Rumpelstilskin level and crack the earth beneath my feet in frustration. I want to cry quietly in a corner somewhere. I want to hug all of my family all at once and never let go. I want to be with Jacob, bullshitting about the world, explaining ourselves away into contented understanding. We would always be laughing. Always thinking. Always interested in the world. I want to hear Ian and Jacob teasing each other and watching MacGyver. I want the chance to go back and savor each of these experiences all the more, and to make at least one more effort to spend time with him. To jump into snow with him in nothing more than our skivvies. To be closer to him. To be a better sister to him.

Operation SnowLove from Joseph Hansbrough on Vimeo.

I love you Jacob. You were a thoughtful, spacey, ardent, funny, insightful, and artistic man, who brought comfort and sanity to those around you. You were an easy-going, fun-loving, entertaining, energetic, enthusiastic boy who I will always remember taking care of and watching grow. I wish you had had more opportunities to embark on the adventures you wanted so much to enjoy. I wish you had been able to have all the things you wished for. I am so glad you were here. With us. Being you. You are amazing. And we are all better for having known you.

Love you.

So, as any self-respecting Americans will do when faced with financial adversity, we got ready to head West! Ian was sure he’d find more work in the Los Angeles area, and I had just learned about a loan repayment program for my line of work that would suit our move. My over-planning brain ran wild, and I started researching credentialing requirements and found some job leads in Arizona, New Mexico, and California. We even went so far as to visit LA and Arizona so we could get a feel for the areas and to follow up on some job opportunities. Friends were preparing to welcome us on the west coast with open arms, people were looking forward to working with me, and life seemed about to change by January.

Ian looking over LA from Runyon Canyon

I will be honest. I was excited. Though I am in a very good place in my life right now, I have a dash of wanderlust in me that has been itching for a while. I am thrilled that others can settle in the world and cultivate community and local identity, but I have not seen myself in this light for years. When I decided I wasn’t going to be able to be a hermit, I saw myself as becoming a worldly, cosmopolitan adventurer of the world. And Ian sounded ready, and the Southwest is an amazing place. I wanted some desert, some sunshine, and some mesas. I was ready to go.

Except. The credentialing process proved to be time-consuming and full of small, but game-changing, nuances as to whether I could get licensed or not. And each state has different requirements (yay state rights!), which made the process even longer and more confusing. Over six months later, I still have to get more paperwork and hours done before I can apply to ONE of these states in which I was looking to work. And the flourish of employers expressing interest had dropped down to a select few. And while I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out a bureaucratic confluence of paperwork, Ian interviewed for a job. In DC. Wait, what? But DC is on the East Coast!?! I thought we were going to slowly cook ourselves happy in the oven of Arizona? Surrounded by cacti and mesquite? Or explore all of the amazing Asian food options in California? I mean, as soon as this paperwork says we can, right?

When we started planning our move, it was with the understanding that it would happen if it was meant to happen. That if God agreed that the move was the best thing for us to do, we’d have minimal issues making it happen. So, though my sails were deflated, I had to read the signs in front of me. This job in DC was an excellent opportunity for Ian and he really wanted to get it. So, perhaps my frantic goal for heading west this year is misguided. Or just untimely maybe. Either way, I have to be able to let it go and stop the overplanning, darnit!
As things have worked out, Ian has gotten this new job and we’re staying put. He’s even made a video to help announce this exciting new chapter in his career.
As for me? The disappointment is there, sure, but I have to say that it feels a lot better not having to do all of that blasted paperwork.

Neither of us have ever seen it and I thought would be fun if Jes and I put our preconceptions on record.

I’ll go first.

Jack Black the panda is an outcast from the other pandas because of his unpandalike desire to be a Kung Fu master. He meets a master who sees potential in him and who trains him. Master’s old enemies are jealous of Jack Black panda’s skills and take the master. JBP must prove to himself that he has what it takes to save master. I also think there’s a girl panda interest too.
Basically Karate Kid with pandas.

Here is Jessica’s notion:

Panda is the Chosen One, sought out by powers that be to defeat the ultimate scourge. Panda is a schlub who doesn’t look like he can do the job. Powers that be train Panda in the range of styles, taught by the namesake animals. He looks like a failure until he finds some motivating and compelling reason to fight. He finds his inner Chosen One when his teachers and loved ones are at risk. He saves the day.

The movie is just beginning now.

UPDATE:
Jes was far closer to the facts of the movie, something she attributes to seeing more of the movie trailers than I did. Incredibly imaginative film.

Who the Hell is Bob McElroy?

Bob McElroy was a musician I met while living in at the Santa Fe International Youth Hostel in 1999. He was in town from Monroe, Louisiana to meet with Gary Johnson, then-governor of New Mexico, on the topic of marijuana decriminalization legislation. To this meeting he dressed in an all-white suit with a bolo tie, which at 78 years old, scruffy beard and head of white hair, made him look too much like Colonel Sanders for comfort. Later that night, I found him in the common room singing folk songs to an audience of touring Japanese girls. I asked if I could record him and he was happy to oblige. I immediately ran to Radio Shack, purchased a cheap boundary microphone that I could connect to my MiniDisc recorder, grabbed a six pack of Lone Star talls at the pharmacy, ran back to the hostel and sat Bob down outside the hostel kitchen where he played and I recorded until quiet hour.

Not everything he said was the truth, but enough was.

Bob was an extremely interesting person. A former member of a biker gang and psychedelic enthusiast. With his skepticism of organized religious ideals and anti-establishment attitude he’s exactly the type of person you’d expect to meet while living my life. As he puts it while talking about being “locked up for crazy,” “[Mad houses are] all about separating out people who are constitutionally opposed to following the rules other people have set down.” Or when I ask him to play the song where “the bad guy gets away at the end” he retorts, “the cop’s the bad guy.” He had a special way of looking at things that resonated with me. I didn’t want to be him, or even spend a lot of time with him. That evening, extended for ten years by recording technology, was all I needed. Bob died in 2002.

It’s my pleasure to share the entire evening’s recordings with you.

He’s in quite a state: laying there with a collapsed lung, tired, in pain, and getting a lot of tests done. But he’s okay. By okay, I mean alive, talking, and stable.

My whole day has been spent alternating between thinking he’s okay and thinking that he’s not. And I find myself frustrated with the whole arrangement of things.

A month ago, my brother was dropped from my parents’ insurance plan. Now he gets into an accident that involves a helicopter, multiple days in the hospital, multiple tests. He has no job right now.

This is not okay.

But he’s alive. Thank goodness. And he’s relatively whole, and will likely come home soon. The guy is a trooper, and tries to be pleasant to everyone and probably should have kicked us out a while ago today. He was tired when I saw him, and that was before anyone else got there. Damn it if he shouldn’t have just blown up at us without regards to propriety, and sent us home. This kind of stress shouldn’t get trussed up to save others. This sucks.

And now I find myself doing the same thing. I feel so at ends right now. I need a place to vent, and I never update this bloody site. But really. I mean, come on. It feels foolish to think that what I write here matters. I cannot write too much in order to protect my private life from my work; I cannot write anything worth reading if it’s not personal. When I delve into feelings, I find myself just bitching. When I try to be witty, it all falls flat. This is nonsense.

And as I write this entry, with the hope that it is honest to my feelings, I find myself tucking all of these things up and getting ready to go back to work tomorrow, to support my godsister tomorrow at her high school play, to have a play date with my cousin for both of our sakes, to go to a family event on Sunday. After all that’s done, I find I am trying to figure out how Ian and I can contribute to whatever costs my brother will incur from this hospital “adventure”, even though I already am flirting with burnout and am dealing with a severely compromised budget as it is.

No matter how much I wish for my brother to feel better and to take care of himself, I really find this entire situation to be ridiculous. After all,  I cannot figure out a reasonable way to do it for myself.

While it’s always made me feel proud and optimistic, I think it’s given me every excuse to rest on my laurels and wait for it all to happen. When I was a teenager I wrote songs and people seemed to be in awe of this simple gift of expression. Imagining myself with a record deal, standing on a stage before thousands of adoring fans, money falling out of the sky I let myself slide into my mid-twenties (seemingly the terminus of rockstardom). Around that time my skills started to wane. I never got as good at guitar as my peers, my ability to create catchy melodies dried up, family and work responsibilities replaced the free time I needed to get baked and jam with myself. But moreover, my previous accomplishments seemed to trump what I was currently producing which led to trepidation regarding every note I played. “I’m not as good as I used to be” would be my paralyzing mantra. The thousands of adoring fans became a billion possible critics of the crap I wiped onto tape.

About six years ago I parlayed the skills I developed editing audio into editing video. This was my calling all-of-the-sudden– Visual Storytelling. I got really into movies, sucking up as many as I could and trying to apply the techniques I gleaned to making my own. I was alright at shooting, after all, I did spend two semesters in high school photography. But where I thought I really excelled was in storyboarding and telling the story through the edit. The former was such a wonderful adventure because I was able to use my imagination– free from a camera and crew to compose the visual story, the latter because it was a more pragmatic and concrete method of painting the stages in an imaginary event. Movie-making stardom was only a few years away, I was sure.

Climbing the ladder

Naturally, I found a way to do what I liked doing and make money. Sticking to what I knew was my calling and eventually becoming extremely well-know for it was the way to go. No more sitting around waiting for David Geffin to get my demo tape from a friend of a friend. I was taking my destiny in my own hands. My cheap, little online movies landed me cheap, little job after cheap, little job. The work was simple, yet heartbreakingly embarrassing. Tribute slide-shows for bat mitzvahs, corporate pieces for manufacturers of TiO2 and something known as ‘ERP’ (the client never filled me in on what the hell that is) haven’t gotten me very far to-date.

Still feeling like I should be part of an incredible team making incredible work, I’m frustrated by the fact that nearly everyone I work with has less talent, vision and responsibility to the end-product than I do. Everyday is a challenge, and not the kind of challenge you’d face with self-dignity and the desire to overcome. It’s the kind of challenge where people who work in cubes all day tell you how to work your skill. The kind of challenge where non-designers force you to make design decisions you know are wrong, where the computer-illiterate use you as a mouse and keyboard– executing their bastard whim upon the project. Working with bottom-feeders for so long has convinced me that that’s how I will be someone. This is how I shine. My abilities are so far and above the people who surround me that I practically am a rock star.

This isn’t about feeling like I should be something and complaining that I’m not, it’s about how I’m going to manage to get through the rest of my life. I don’t want to work. I barely manage to drag myself into the office everyday only to polish more turds. If I’m going to make it to 70 or 80, I’m really going to have to hit it big in the lottery or a workman’s comp claim because my talent and my stick-to-it-ness certainly aren’t going to carry me into retirement. Maybe that’s why I smoke cigarettes. Maybe it’s better to get life out of the way than to suffer through it for the typical life-span.

Yep. Saturday night Jes and I exchanged our last gifts at Rob and Leah’s with dear friends. The deal: Handmade gifts under $30, secret Santa style. For me, it was memorable because I officially gave birth to The Sutter Puppet, my gift to secret giftee, Niff. I was equally delighted to receive from Eleanor, a handsome, framed, silk screen portrait of myself. She rolled a hot pair of Eleanor Briefs™ into the deal; one which pretty accurately portrays its contents. Thank you so much, Elea.

Meet The Sutter Puppet

The Niff isn’t exactly an easy recipient when your dealing with special occasion, hand-made gifts. Not that she’d be particularly picky, as long as you put some thought into it– it’s just that she’s so damned talented. Someone in my position (with a tenth-grade art education) has only one choice: Be Clever. I riffed off of Rob’s Virtual Stan idea from years ago and created a Virtual Sutter. I probably couldn’t have pulled it off without the help I got from Paul Muller’s videos. After the party, we drove back to Niff’s house in stitches listening to her portray her true love as he would issue instructions on how to give oral sex to a man… er, oneself, in this case. “You go up… down… updownupdown.” I should mention now that I made the puppet anatomically correct (read: he’s got a ween). Sutter absolutely hates this little clone– a sign that it’s a great gift, say some– and I’m really sorry that’s the case. He should have a little self esteem and learn to love himself for all his wonderful qualities. Freckles, button nose, deep voice, six-foot-long legs. Coincidently, Kevin Nocoins, who bagged Sutter himself in the gift match-up, also presented a Sutter doll. His exaggerates (slightly) the length of Sutter’s arms and legs. Penis is distinctly absent. Pure Nocoins.

Merry Christmas, The Niff! I look forward to seeing your YouTube channel light up with Sutter Puppet vlogs.

I’ll let Jes explain her part

Though Ian argues that Niff is hard to make things for, I got Jason Santa Maria (Stan), and I would say that he’s harder. I feel like he’s the type of person who has everything. Thank goodness for the inside source system! Liz Danzico helped me out a lot by letting me know Stan’s current needs. Since I didn’t think potholders would be all that impressive of a gift and I couldn’t guarantee that a bike bag I made could hold pounds of a bike chain lock, it came down to making something NYC related.

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that the only real points of fondness I have for New York came from my visits with my college friend Dan Steinberg. Going to visit Dan in New York meant getting tours of Chinatown and learning about the gang wars it experienced, or getting the first tenement building pointed out on a walk to the store. So, I thought, why not make a(n) NYC guide like a Dan tour? Move over Lonely Planet!

Garnering Dan’s help along with my cousin Miah, the Internet, and coworkers, I developed a conglomerate of little factoids, cool spots to visit, and maps galore to put into a Moleskine notebook. Insert a bunch of cool pictures, rub in the headings, expand the spine to hold it all, and use the leftover map to make a new spine and little case for it, and there you have it! Poor Stan has to try to read my handwriting, but it’ll do. I’m hoping he’ll find it useful enough to not get lost at least, but he seemed to like it. Though Moleskine has already come out with similar books, I think he’ll like mine better.

Thanks Liz!

Not only did Liz save my gift with giving me good hints, she also got my name in Secret Santa.

She made me a little pillow packed with punch. Okay, so it was really just overstuffed as much as possible. I like my pillows to be as close to a sandbag as can be–pretty hard; Ian illustrated my preferences by drawing a cinder block, to give you an idea. Liz’s pillow was certainly firm (and came with extra stuffing just in case), but it wasn’t hard. Though the pillow was undoubtedly awesome with its tissue and thermometer pockets, I was slightly worried it’d be too soft. Until I slept on it. Wow! I am won over Liz! Thank you! Thank you!