Personal

What are we afraid of? The unknown! When are we afraid of it? Now!

#10yearsago I had just finished school and had too many design ambitions to choose from. Thus was the decade defined.

Feeling like the only thing I ever learned to do was talk bullshit, and I'm not even good at that.

At what point does people underestimating your age become less about your spry youthfulness and more about your immaturity?

When I was growing up, holidays offered early indications that communication design was in my future.

Determined to avoid disappointment on Christmas morning, I made what I wanted perfectly clear to both Santa Claus and my parents, constructing lists that were not only categorized and prioritized, but cross-referenced with several catalogs.

My approach to Halloween was no less meticulous. Putting together appropriately macabre costumes certainly appealed to my creativity, but as a child of the… See more →

In 1993, Washington DC’s fertile indie rock scene gave birth to a band called The Dismemberment Plan. Musically, it skirted genre conventions inconspicuously. Lyrically, it found wisdom and poetry in the commonplace. The whole package was a rare, fun, magical blend of sophisticated and approachable, and the band built a respectable and devoted following with it.

Ten years later, not long after releasing its fourth and arguably best album, The Dismemberment Plan decided to call… See more →

In an imagined conversation about how often I'm out of town, I instinctively said, "I don't actually live here." It still feels that way.

Thankful for my selective capacity for melodrama.

Thanks all for the birthday wishes. In a few more months, I will have outlived Jesus. Take that, Jesus!

Each day reveals that things are actually more complicated than I thought they were the day before. This will continue for some time.

Growing pains.

Gotta get out of this terrible habit of planning things under the assumption that they'll go smoothly.

Learning how and when to keep my mouth shut. One painful day at a time.

The less convenient it is to return to your hometown, the more you feel like you really live somewhere else.

Rest and relaxation is one thing, but sometimes sleep just seems like such a waste of time.

Pro: Inspiration. Con: Withdrawal.

For the first time in twelve years, I don't own a car. I'm glad to be rid of it, but I also feel kind of trapped.

This morning's 2 mile, 35 minute drive summarily vaporized any doubts I may have had about selling my car tomorrow.

1. Bought drinking glass. 2. Bought grape juice. 3. Considered cutting down on my swearing. I bet you can guess 4.

There's too much to know, too much to do. Satisfaction doesn't exist. It's awful. It's wonderful.

If you want to be sure you love someone, move far away from them.

Put my underwear on backwards today, apparently. FYI.

This month, Cambridge and Philadelphia are my parallel universes. As part of the bargain, my desk chair in the latter is now made of cat.

Backstage, an hour before show time, the cramped green room buzzed and shuffled with conversation and preparation. Rhinestones and tassels adorned leather and denim, which adorned bodies aged eighteen to forty-eight, travelers hailing from as far as West Virginia. Many were veterans of the air guitar stage, and some had competed as recently as the previous night. Having failed to capture the titles in their home towns of New York, Boston, and Washington DC, they… See more →

What a year this turned out to be.

Shortly after the year began, my time with the amazing team at Happy Cog ended. It was the best thing for all concerned, even if my lack of an exit strategy left me without direction. My comfort zone was toxic, so really, any direction would do.

I set out to get healthy, physically and mentally. I got my finances in order. I drove 9,400 miles around the… See more →

Wishing I had more scapegoats for my inadequacies.

Consistently organized people are either keenly adaptable to change or unwilling to change. I am neither of these things.

The video of the story of the stupidest thing I ever did: viddler.com/explore/uwishunu/…

My beard has been rated 9.5/10 on Beard Revue. I'll add that to the goals list and check it off. beardrevue.com/2008/07/rob-we…

Thank you everyone for the kind birthday wishes!

The only thing I hate as much as the sun is sunscreen.

Picking up the pieces.

having a hard time concentrating on how hard it is to concentrate.

Recently, I started wondering if I could/should get back into writing in cursive, which I haven’t done with any regularity since elementary school. I thought it might be interesting to reconnect with the way I related to language and typography in my formative years, and to see how that meshed with what I’ve learned since. So, I started scribbling out some random stuff in my sketchbook to see what would happen, and was fascinated with… See more →

pondering the environments of which I am a product.

wondering for the umpteenth time if my persistent difficulty with keeping focus is a neurochemical problem, a discipline problem, or both.

My whole design process is basically an attempt to mine gold from crippling neuroses. That's kind of fucked up.

disturbed by how consistently bad I am at being a responsible adult.

wondering if any other line of work I might have chosen would so consistently infuriate me.

completely distracted; absolutely buzzing with inspiration.

watching my ex get married.

declaring Monday, October 22nd to be "Humility Day," when I will post on my site about the dumbest thing I ever did. Who's with me?

marveling at how much can change in five years.

just discovered someone else with my name--same spelling and everything. This is a first. AND he goes to school nearby. Crazy.

I killed my own summer. I took on more work than I should have, and hopefully I suffered the consequences more than my clients did. The summer is drawing to a close, though, and with its end, my schedule is finally becoming kind of manageable again. Today was the first day in ages that I was able to leave the house for something that didn’t resemble work.

In the early afternoon, I took in the… See more →

For the last few years, I’ve been getting the bulk of my world news from a number of New York Times RSS feeds. I’m sure you don’t need me to extoll the publication’s manifold virtues. However, as a Philadelphia resident, one thing the New York Times can’t give me is detailed local news. As my schedule’s density has increased, my ability to absorb the local goings-on through my usual channels (free weeklies and sheer osmosis)… See more →

One doesn’t often have the opportunity to work on a project that strengthens his skills in multiple disciplines and helps him reevaluate his connection to his heritage. I have been fortunate to have just such an opportunity, and after months of hard work, that project is now available for public consumption.

In late August of last year, a handful of Happy Cogs flew out to Dublin to meet with some of the cheerful folks who… See more →

Almost a year ago, on the way home from an evening at a local bar, three of my friends and I were robbed at gunpoint as I was unlocking the front door of my apartment. It was over pretty quickly and the robber made off with a modest amount of cash. As freaked out as I was by the experience, I wouldn’t say that it necessarily caused me any lasting psychological trauma, beyond the fact… See more →

I was born on 3 June 1976. Today, I am thirty years old.

I share 1976 with some important stuff. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed Apple Computer, which would inadvertently revolutionize creative technology and desktop computing. Seminal releases from the Ramones and the Damned—and a legendary television appearance by the Sex Pistols—brought punk rock’s disaffected bite into the public consciousness. We said goodbye to luminaries like Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, and Howard… See more →