Lay my figures bare
              and give them no rest,

I can relate to his premise, that he was born on Jupiter

and must be getting back soon,

that the earth is a failed planet,

that rehearsal itself
              becomes a ceremony.

Cedar Sigo

Thanks Chị Tâm for doing the research and organizing the trip. The detailed Google Sheet is very helpful.

All of our family members have seasonal passes; therefore, we have a handful of buddy passes. I believe buddy passes are 40% off the rate for the day you want to ski. If you missed the Epic Day deal and still want to join us, let me know. I will send you the link to purchase the passes online in advance. We have to pick up the tickets together at the window.

For skiing lessons, you should definitely sign up for your kids. I recommend a half-day group lesson. Kids will pick up fast. They’ll be able to ski after 4 hours of learning. They can learn in the morning and ski with their Scout buddies the rest of the day.

For adults, I can give you some skiing tips, but you should also take a two-hour or half-day group lesson. When I first started, I hesitated to learn skiing. My wife signed me up without my consent for a two-hour lesson and forced me to take it. She wanted me to ski with the kids. That lesson unlocked the potential I didn’t know I had. You should get that experience as well.

As for snowboarding, the learning curve is steeper than skiing. I started learning snowboarding last season. I fell five days straight before I could start to snowboard. That first day was brutal. My whole body was in pain. Skating off the lift was also a challenge. I fell every time. After I got over the boot-camp period, however, I enjoyed snowboarding immensely. Nowadays, I switch back and forth between skiing and snowboarding. I love both sports.

In addition to taking lessons, the best place to learn skiing and snowboarding is YouTube. You should check out the videos before hitting the slopes. I learned intermediate skills through YouTube videos.

I hope you will give these sports a try. They will keep you and your kids active during the winter. Before skiing and snowboarding, our family caught all kinds of winter illnesses. In the past few years, we enjoyed our winter activities a whole lot more than before.

I think I forgot to turn
off the radio when
I left my mother’s
womb

In Hasidic Judaism
it is said that before we
are born an angel
enters the womb,
strikes us on the
mouth
and we forget all
that we knew of
previous lives—
all that we know
of heaven

I think that I forgot
to forget.
I was born into two
places at once—

In one, it was chilly
lonely physical &
uncomfortable

in the other, I stayed
in the dimension of
Spirit. What I knew,
I knew.
I did not forget
Voices
The world of spirit
held me in its arms.

Diane di Prima

Airey’s Identity Designed delves into 16 different brands. My personal favorites are Ad Age and Rooster Beers. The book featured both texts and illustrations. The format is repetitive. The body text is set in Alegreya. The size is a bit too big; therefore, it doesn’t look as solid as it should. The text size should be a bit smaller. Avenir Next for big text is just fantastic.

Mandy Brown quit her job. Robin Rendle also quit his job. I have tremendous respect for Mandy and Robin. They both have written about their experience with candid and honesty. I appreciate what they have shared and glad that they put it out there. I am happy for them that they can get out and move on. With their talents, they will be successful in what they will do next.

Everything they had gone through resonated with me. For eleven years, I loved my job and my colleagues. Then my supervisor retired. She was not happy with her new boss. I was forced to join another team (of two). Then what I loved the most at my job is being hostilely taken away. Soon, every line of HTML and CSS I had written from scratch over a decade will be completely vanished.

I stressed the fuck out, but I decided to ride it out. I don’t want to run away every time I run into issues. I needed to put an end to this madness. I am letting go of the things I cared about but out of my control. I am moving on without leaving. I am taking it day by day. I am preparing myself to be ready for whatever comes next.

What Mandy and Robin had said reassures me that I am not alone. I have four kids to raise. I can’t get out, but when push comes to shove, I know where the door is.

Moneybagg Yo has an infectious flow and he can ride hard-throbbing beats as smooth as a shot of Hibiki, like “Keep It Low” featuring Future. When not boasting about sex (“Super Wet”) or jabbing his baby mama (“F My BM”), Moneybagg reveals his pain and emotion. On “Goin Thru It,” he shares, “Treat her like she wifey, bought her a big karat ring / Soon as we agreed to have a child, she had a miscarriage / Deal with that shit behind closed doors.” Hard to Love contains 20 tracks and the beats he picked are consistently banging. Taking out the misogynistic shit, his lyrics are compelling and commanding attention.

They do not fit their given name. They glow
all day in the sun, without
ever opening up; they are able to retain
their shape and their seal under even the weightiest rain.

They may assert, or believe, that any problem
they notice among themselves must be a low
priority next to the crocuses, always picked first,
or compared to the unwell maple, whose phantom limb,
as recently as last summer, could provide
an afternoon of unreliable shade.
Their practice at holding their own
has made them feel less cultivated or planted
than like something they themselves have made.

Nevertheless it is tough for them to remain
so sanguine; they have arranged
to keep themselves together in almost the same
way they keep other people’s secrets,
even when shaky, at dawn, or nearly asleep.

They dangle and dodge in light wind
as if they were windchimes. They are, also, perennial,
able to outlast frost: they can insist
that the most important fact about them—more
than photosynthesis
or chromosomes, varietals or
Latin names—is just
that they continue to exist.

As well as the overfamiliar valentine,
the thumbnail spade for archaeological digs,
they duplicate the alphabet: a V
for victory, as well as a sort of X
wherever two or three will overlap.
Their bone-white, surprisingly durable
extensions resemble parentheses,
or quills, or claws. Once I heard
them claim that they were eggs,
dragon eggs; one day they would, supposedly, split,
detaching the bloom from the ornamental top,
so that the V-shaped part would drop
to Earth, and low-to-the-ground observers could see
the dragonets discover their feet,
their solarized scales, their yet-to-be-sharpened pairs
of retractable talons. The adults who share, or repeat,
these stories must be, not gardeners, but magicians,
the kind who understand how to escape
from anything, whom you hope
can teach you, too, how to do that.

Some renegade botanists
believe the cultivars can be regrown
from even the slightest cutting: one tendril, one stem.
Other experts think this trick can work
for closely related species, but not for them.

V for vigilance. V for vindication.
After a hailstorm, either V in survived,
in visible and invisible. They are the kind
of students who ought to teach, but will not give lectures,
having determined what parts of their own life cycle
are worth trying to explain
to the outer world, what to reveal from within their clusters
of shoots, their extracellular architecture,
and what belongs, for now, on the inside.

Stephanie Burt

Don Norman shifts his attention from The Design of Everyday Things to Design for a Better World. He challenges everyone, not just designers, to change from artificiality to humanity. We have the responsibility to design a meaningful and sustainable environment for ourselves as well as the future generations. Reading this book makes me want to move beyond designing for digital screens and into designing for a better world. As always, his writing is digestible, but my reading experience was quite slow—due to the typesetting. Gotham Book is a readable typeface, but I am not used to reading a 300-page book in a sans serif typeface.

Dad said if I didn’t graduate from high school
he’d buy me my own beauty shop. And that’s pretty
much how it went. I worked on heads.
      My students gave me wise advice.
One said the best critique came from a friend
who just wrote Wonderful! Keep going! on every poem.
Another said his favorite mentor
      simply put a giant X on any page he didn’t like.
Some had studied with lyric pooh-bahs
who taught them to be coffee wallahs.

Do birds theorize flying? I believe the best poetry
      instruction leans toward the oblique.

“This seems to be a ransacked candle.
This tastes like lowa. This reads
like the shortest building in the world
      trying to be tall. This syntax feels kissed.
This is like a bandage
that takes the skin off with it.
These lines look laser-cut;
      these need to be debrided, flayed.
Forget Esperanto. This is written
in Blackwatch Plaid. Did you use a protractor
or a pen to compose it? That school
      of poetics is called ellipsograph tech.

Lyric poets give their words to the wind.
It’s how the wind stays alive. To riff
on Miles Davis, you don’t have to write
      your poem every day.
You just have to touch your poem
every day. Even if it sounds like mucus
made for the glory of God
      or twinkles like a pissed-off
harpsichord. Even if it groans like a medieval
cathedral, eroded at the groins. You’ve heard

how flaws authenticate a gem? Usher in a stir
      and weird the real. Forget the celestial

and remember the celeste–
an organ stop that’s tuned to dissonance
to torque the note. Tone
      is the soul of poetry.
If you need a title ‘Lonely Consort
Of Wandering Phenomenon’ works
for almost anything. When revising think
      how a robin throwing himself against the glass
won’t change it into air.”
Poetry is never finished.
Only poets are. Some must be
      wrapped in burlap to survive.

Some must flash their stitches ==
though the deepest scars
are hidden, the damaged infra-
      trauma they intend to tell.
One bent her lines backwards
like the ankles of a sandhill crane.
One unzipped his surface to reveal
      his furtive fretwork. They all held their breaths
until their tongues turned blue.
Wonderful! Keep going!

Alice Fulton

Max Berlinger writes for the New York Times about the return of aggressive skating. I prefer aggressive skating as an underdog sport at the skate parks so I just do my own things without being embarrassed.