I always have the last laugh

Do you remember when you were little, when adults would laugh at something that didn't make sense, and when you asked what was going on they would just say "You'll understand when you're older"?

The problem with that is that by the time you're "older" you may have forgotten the joke.

Which is why as a child, I wrote them all down.

Seven-year-old Brooke, making a bracelet out of blades of grass: Dad, is there grass in heaven?

Dad: Most stoners would say so.

Twenty-four-year-old Brooke, reading this note fifteen years later: HA. GRASS! I get it.

you may already be a winner

So lately people have been celebrating their France-i-versaries. I'm never one to miss an opportunity to be two weeks late for something so here goes: a year and two weeks ago I showed up in Marseille, terrified of the sea, not fluent in French, and unaware that I had a penchant for rats and MacDo potatoes.

It still amazes me that I managed to move to the other side of the world, get a cell phone, sign a rent agreement, and find foods to eat. There were times when the internet didn't work and I couldn't call my sister at the time I said I would, when the metro shut down and I had to walk four hours, when the guy at the bad postcard office wouldn't sell me stamps because I was an American, the time I was sprinting through the alleys of Paris at 5:30 am with everything I own, but the point is - I kept myself alive for a year. Am I an adult?

at least the baby will have beautiful green eyes

A couple months ago in France I was having a perfectly normal afternoon where I found myself sitting in a park reading while a French man in this eighties was telling my why no Arabic people should be allowed in the country. He was just getting to the part where they will kill us all in our sleep when he stopped mid sentence with a gasp.

"You have green eyes. Why didn't I notice sooner that you have green eyes! Your eyes are the most beautiful thing in the world. And you have such a beautiful smile. Great, American teeth! All you need to do is start exercising a little..."

Maybe in someone else's life this would be the big turning point where they stopped eating a wheel of Brie with a jar of Nutella every morning for breakfast, but for me it wasn't.

No, if I were to have such a turning point it would have been a couple months earlier, when a woman thought I was pregnant. By that I don't mean she asked "When are you due?" or "Is it a boy or a girl" I mean she came up to me, rubbed my stomach, and told me the little munchkin was going to be the luckiest kid in the world to have a mom like me.

What do you say to people when this happens? There is no handbook for this.

why I run

There is a house a couple miles from mine that has astroturf instead of grass, and this morning I finally saw the inhabitants, a classy older couple. He was wearing nice slacks and a dress shirt and she was sporting sporting a silk blouse and a jeweled bracelet, and they were brushing dead leaves off the crayon-green plastic grass using a broom and a dustpan.

when you come around

Here are some of the great dogs I work with. They don't actually do that much work. And one of them isn't great. But if you're a dog all is forgiven.

I think I can safely say I've arrived

We interrupt this period of not-blogging to announce that if you google "ode to snacks" Sky Machines is the second result. People who find my blog that way do not usually ever visit again.

THEN I used the path tool and created a shape on a new layer

For the last couple days I have been doing less thinking


and more thinking LIKE THIS



And partly because it's not as easy to articulate these thoughts and mostly because I know no one else cares, I don't put them on this blog. But for the half a person who does care - today is your lucky day! Here are some places I post about design:



type to me is a collection of typography I like (I warned you this wouldn't be interesting)



a practical bestiary is where I post cool layouts



and whale sharks is advertising, design, and communication arts

I guess the takeaway point is, I like a lot of cool things, but I also like design things. And maybe you're thinking "but design is cool!" but most of my dreams lately are about Adobe Illustrator, and so far no one has been interested in hearing about them. Now I'm off to watch some more web coding tutorials.

time travel, construction, and one-eyed dogs

This summer I was going through some of my old high school notebooks and found a page where I had summed up a day with this phrase:

"It was so sweet I would have cried if I were someone who cries."

I first started experimenting with time travel fifteen years ago, when I discovered I could write little notes that said "Dear 10-year-old Brooke. Hi this is 9-year-old Brooke. You are reading this in the future! You are cool! You are 10 years old! I'm 9." Ten-year-old Brooke had a handful of visits from the past, but sixteen-year-old Brooke was bombarded with them. The week after my sixteenth birthday I opened a packet of about two-dozen letters I had written to my sixteen-year-old self, and they continued steadily throughout the year, because there were some where I wanted to write what had been going on "on this day x years ago." Thrilling. Most of them read like this:

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
WOW you are SIXTEEN! I can't believe that. SIXTEEN! I bet it feels normal to you though, lol. I bet you are really pretty.

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
You are the coolest person I know because you are sixteen and I don't know you yet but I kind of do because I AM you, but four years younger! I wish I were just like you. Do you drive? Do you have a boyfriend? I bet you look really cool and have a lot of friends and I think you are so great. 

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
Hey wutz ^? (That's a cool way of saying "what's up" if you don't remember lol) You're sixteen, that's so cool. I want to marry someone who is really hot, and funny and super good looking and looks good. 

Dear 16-year-old Brooke,
Oh hi I'm 9 you are 16 do you have a boyfriend? Is he really really nice? Have you kissed him?

Obviously these have never been as useful to me as they would have been to a child therapist. What WOULD be great would be if I could send letters backwards. I would constantly be writing them. I don't even know where I'd start on what to say to myself in high school, but I know I would throw in this note: Some day you are going to be the kind of person who cries.

Because everything has me in tears lately. Happy things, sad things, so-un-emotional-it-somehow-IS-emotional things. The ultimate proof of what a mess I am is that I get choked up every time I watch this video.



Sweet, sweet man. He just wants to take his cousin to California adventure. His Disney Dollars are going to expire! Goodness I'm tearing up just typing that.

I have a soft spot for middle-aged men who don't have everything under control. I also have a soft spot for dogs missing eyes, people dropping things, old photos, when someone laughs at their own joke and no one else does, college students who practice kissing their arm because they've never kissed a girl, lost cats, Apple ads, old people around a lot of young people that aren't paying attention to them, women making fake Uncrustable sandwiches to make it seem like they can afford real Uncrustables, commercials where people make coffee and share a special moment, people randomly running into friends, grocery store cashiers who are surrounded by people all day but no one talks to them, a single mom going to Target and buying a ton of board games and asking her teenage kids to play them with her but they won't and the board games were really expensive and she can't find the receipt, and spoons that are alone in the dish drainer.

I don't think twenty-four-year-old Brooke has gotten a time-traveling letter. Probably because it would have read like this:

Dear 24-year-old Brooke
I know your eyesight is probably gone by now, but I'm assuming one of your grandchildren is reading this to you (please speak up her hearing is also really bad). 

I hope your arthritis is doing ok and that you're not eating apples with worms in them and yelling that they're perfectly fine - it grosses everyone out and it can't be easy to eat apples when you don't have any teeth left.  

Remember when you were sixteen? Did you say "Sweet Sixteen" when you were sixteen? I reminded you in several letters to say it because it seems like it would be a fun thing to say and you had an entire year to do it. I really hope you listened to that advice. Were you so pretty? Did you kiss a boy? Goodness. I can't wait to be sixteen.

start spreading the news

I already know why you're reading this.

You had a weird feeling just now, that something was different in the world, so you went to the world's numberone source of breaking news, Sky Machines.

You're going to be glad you did, because your instincts were dead on. After a month of sleeping on a (surprisingly comfortable) camping mattress, I broke down and...


PURCHASED A BED.

And while I was at it...


PURCHASED A DESK.



And a plant. She's already heard stories about what I've done to plants in the past. No, I haven't named her. Lately I'm trying to save every good name in the world because when I get a dog soon I don't want anyone to say, isn't that the same name you gave to a potted plant last year? In college I had two cactuses named Mary Kate and Ashley and I'm still kicking myself for wasting that one. When I complete the room with a fish maybe I'll give the two of them a pair of names. I think they'll get along because fish and plants have a similar IQ. No offense to plants.

If you skipped that last paragraph, welcome back. As I was saying, the combination of not needing to hunch over my tiny cardboard desk AND sleeping on a real mattress makes me feel twenty years younger.

When I was out running this morning (after a night of sleeping like a toddler) I saw a half-rotten broken bookshelf lying on the side of the road! Fabulous furniture is one of many perks of this new route I've been running. There are also palm trees, more dogs, and fewer groups of old men that sit together on benches and stare at people who run by.

When my roommate saw me coming up the stairs with it she didn't ask what on earth it was or why I left to go for a run and came home with it. In fact, she'd already told me a week ago that I should disinfect any trash I brought in the apartment. So all she had to say was "Good morning!" It's nice to have roommates who know you well. And the best part is that it's the perfect size for my room.



I turned it on its side because the top is missing. Considering the fact that delusional people are trying to sell used bookcases on Craigslist for $120, I think this is a steal. And according to LA curbside furniture laws, I could be right.

add this to the list

While I was waiting in line for the bathroom at a Kanye concert the other night, a woman wearing bright green eye makeup started chatting with me. "Who knew there would be so much sun today!" she chirped. "I'm like totally red!"

"Yeah," I answered. Cautiously. Because I have a bad reputation of saying awkward things around strangers. "You DO have a lot of color on your face... and I'm not just talking about your bright green eye makeup."

Then I weighed my post-gaffe options: high pitched fake laugher or staring intently at the paper towel dispenser. Staring won. 

If I ever make any friends it will be a miracle. Having this outfit wouldn't hurt my chances.

why can't you just quietly pick your nose like the rest of us

You're not going to believe this, but in fourth grade I really liked writing.

And maybe I was decent at it, or maybe just because I liked it, or maybe because he was worried about how I was spending my free time, my fourth grade teacher assigned me to be Class Storyteller. It was supposedly a part of a district-wide writers/slave-laborers program, and the requirement was that every two weeks I would write a short piece of fiction and read it to the class.

If I can take a minute to make fun of a nine-year old, those were probably the worst stories that have ever been written in the history of the world. I remember one particularly rough morning my teacher reminded me that I was supposed to present in five minutes (after Recycling Tip of the Day), and I answered "Oh right of course! Could I take a second in the hall to practice reading it? And also could I borrow a couple blank sheets of paper and a pencil?" I don't know how other Class Storytellers were faring, but things were ugly in Room 18.

I still remember my fourth grade room number because we had a really catchy song about it. Every time I can't remember something important I realize it was probably supposed to go in the part of my brain that's being taken up by my fourth grade room number.

On a slightly-more-successful Class Storyteller day I read a tale about a suburban boy whose dog went missing over a school vacation. He spent most of the story looking for her, speculating about her kidnapping/death/murder/escape, only to find her in his backyard in the last paragraph, with a new litter of puppies. I hated dogs as a child, but had sat down to work on my writing assignment immediately after watching a similar plot on a made-for-tv movie. At the end I asked the classmates who were still awake if there were any questions.

One girl (probably Margaret) raised her hand. "At the beginning of the story you said that his dog went missing over spring break, but then a couple days later at the end of the story he said that he needed to find her soon because summer vacation was ending. Why is that?

I gave her a look that said "At the beginning of your sentence it seemed like you were complaining about the problematic logic and general disregard for congruent details in my story, but at the end of the sentence I realized you haven't written a story, but you're still complaining about mine. Why is that?"

And out loud I said "Good question Margaret. Does anyone else have a question?"

I don't remember being Class Storyteller for very long.