Just officially left the online advertising firm that's been my day job for the past two years.  Realized for the first time that I actually have some freetime during the day, and that for the first time in a long while, I have some space and time to do some things that would seem like a luxury while I was working.   In the past couple months, I've kind of been in a book reading phase, and here are a few of the books I read:

Outliers: Malcolm Gladwell
Dance Dance Dance: Haruki Murakami
The Road Less Traveled: M.Scott Peck
Three Cups of Tea: Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
Touching the Void: Joe Simpson
Prince of the Marshes: Rory Stewart
Brothers: Da Chen
The Last Lecture: Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow
The Power Of Now: Eckhart Tolle
Obama:From Promise to Power
Angela's Ashes: Frank McCourt
The Shadow of the Wind: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Guide to Music Publishing: Randall Wixen

There's a number of others that I've picked up or put down, but all of these books made a strong impression on me that I would definitely recommend them/ would definitely read them again!

Recently, I've been some some freelance consulting work, continuing as a host for ICS, got conned (haha!) into a fun role in a 1920s Shanghai TV drama (see pic below.)  I'm still in the brief respite period where I wonder why I would be crazy enough to actually have a full time job-- give me a couple weeks without deadlines or things to build and I will wonder why I was crazy enough to stop working!

Here are a couple of artsy pics a friend took of me bumming around sheshan a couple days ago.

Here's a poster for the TV show I'm going to be in. 

More to come soon, I hope!

Just digging up some old journal entries and found this one from about a year ago-- thought it would be worth reprinting.

Today, I calculated something that's been bothering me bit.  That nagging feeling once you hit your late twenties time seems to speed up. Look it over, calculate it. There is something there.  Let’s call it statistical accelleration of age.

In extremely busy times, I look back on weeks or months of my life, and all of a sudden wonder where it went. And I feel somehow that time has begun to accellerate. In a way it has. Break it out in a spreadsheet and measure it. Time and its statistical relation as a proportion to your life changes as you age.

Time spent after preschool waiting for the ice-cream truck, or parents to come home-- those few hours, statistically are equivalent to a day in my life now.  Even so, those few hours seemed like forever.

A day to a 4 year old is equivalent to 7.5 days of a 30 year old.  A day passes much faster now.  It reaches scary proportions. From people's first memories of life, probably lying in a crib, staring at the ceiling, a day is a long time. If you live to your late 90s that day is the statistical equivalent to months.

Thought about another way, those months are as much as a quarter lifetime of your first prescient infant self.

As you get more days, each day has less value as a part of the whole.

I passed through a phase, about 28, where it scared me a bit, how the forward velocity of aging actually seemed to be compounding.   I could feel it in the morning sometimes—a vague shortness of breath, sloshing through the rain on the way to work, thinking here is my life.  I have an amazing job, but as with even the most blessed, I have moments where I feel I have more room to realize my potential.

It still does bother me in some ways.  Out of the thoughts and dreams I’ve had in my life—perhaps too many I’ll admit, though I know I’m not alone--- out of those goals, perhaps I’ll accomplish a mere 10%.  But once I’ve grappled with the thought, my comfort with this whole issue changes.

To paraphrase Michael Chrichton, each microsecond is the microcosm of the whole. The structure of one millisecond of your life reflects the shape your entire life will take.   That is, the intensity of love and passion; or apathy and malice that you throw into one moment of your life will define your legacy.   

"What does it feel like to be alive? 
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly backup, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! 
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit." 
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

That picture doesn't have much to do with anything.  I took it in Beijing a week and a half ago.  Just a little girl innocently riding a skateboard eating an ice cream cone in front of a Chanel store.  But then again, that's Beijing.

I started hosting a daily TV show on the ICS channel in shanghai. Well, actually, I fortunately shoot 5 episodes every monday morning, and then get off to my day job, which is probably good considering the jokes they scrīpt for me on the show, which are so dull you can't tell if they are actually jokes are not, which is generally not a good sign.  If they added in the corny laugh-track, it might make it easier, but as it is I just shoot it in a blue-screen studio at SMG with a camera-man who tends to fall asleep on the couch in between shots.  Well, maybe only once today, but still.

So, not telling anyone when it starts running yet, but the good news is that I look a lot like a monkey on screen, especially in the first few episodes where I had a tendency to make gestures hand gestures way out in front of my body, which on the screen, makes my hands look 5 times the size of my face.  As I said, I look like a monkey, which at least makes the show a bit more entertaining to watch.

Well, more on that later.  But, my point was that this was something I meant to write about this about a month ago, but I never did.

I'm kind of closet artist- musician, amateur performer, photographer, athlete.  But also kind of perfectionist unfortunately, which for the most part means I never share much to anyone other than good friends unless its close to perfect, which is rarely if ever.<p> The side effect of this is that I tend to look at outcomes probably way more than is healthy-- and forget to revel, joke about, document, and remember the journey that it took to get there.  Fearful sometimes because I've had a few friends whose lives have been cut tragically short in their youth, and although there's always memories, just kind of wish they were better documented. 

I went to Beijing by myself when I was a teenager about 10 years ago--spent a year there.  And can't remember seeing anybody riding a skateboard around.  There were hardly any smooth streets then, let alone outdoor malls with Chanel stores.  But things change, and every now and then, I feel like its good to freeze the moment-- just hold it up to the light and examine it, and then record it before moving on.

  I found the perfect procrastination activity-- on the roof of my apartment.