Reading / thinking about
▸
Started reading the long-overdue Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Picked up a copy very randomly in a small college town in Ohio, because I thought it was on sale.
▸
Prepping a planning methods class [link to Notion Syllabus] with Xiaofan. The question of what to cover and how keeps folding back into harder ones: what urban tech is, and how a planning school (not an info school like my master's) should position itself in it.
Life
▸
I took a 20-day road trip this summer (in a loaner). Still ruminating on the verdict. I'm trying to write down the reflections while I can, since I started with a lot of thoughts and they've mostly subsided since. Logistically complicated and physically taxing, sure. But there's something to the idea that travel isn't pinching the map on a seatback screen (though the Daily ran a good elegy [link to episode] for Spirit Airlines that argues the opposite; then I realized Spirit does not even give you a screen). You're required to experience the getting-there (sort of, though Pirsig spent a whole book arguing a motorcycle does it better). Not the arriving, the process. The smell of animal feces, campfire, and my fear of the GW Bridge toll.