Zeen - 004

Note: I made this website in an effort to have more control over the design and to serve as a hub to record things I write, make, etc. and to house Sophie and I's Zeen posts. Moving away from Substack gives us the ability to customize the way the site looks and its functionality. It's pretty basic at the moment, but hopefully it works well for you. Let us know if you have any issues!

-Zach & Sophie

Why must we create? We must create.

I like building things. Always have. Tinkering is fun, too, as is piddling1. I have a few theories as to why: one is simply that I’m emulating what I observed while growing up, another that I’m genetically wired to want to know how things work (it’s extremely difficult for me not to immediately take apart, clean and reassemble any used tool I buy; often unsuccessfully, much to Sophie’s chagrin),,, maybe it’s some sort of Protestant Psychological Nativism driven by deep-seated genetic memories.

Whatever the reason, here I find myself: writing some sort of essay / newsletter / update thing and preparing to publish said thing to the website I built. To build it, I had to learn HTML, CSS and some sort of JavaScript language called Handlebars. That gave me the skills to create a theme for the Ghost platform, which is what's under the hood of this site. I also had to learn how to port forward requests to z-a-c-h.com from my router to an unprivileged Linux container on a server underneath my couch running Caddy, then figure out how to reverse proxy that traffic to another Linux container (that one running Ghost on a different server underneath my couch), learn how to integrate some service called Mailgun with Ghost so I can bulk send newsletter emails, etc., etc...

Basically: it took some effort. I didn't really know what I was doing most of the time, but I figured it out. I like making stuff.

"Making stuff for the sake of it"

I don’t really know what this means. It’s something I thought recently, and I’m sure someone’s said it before2, but it feels like some sort of pure-universal-truth concept-knowledge-lockbox-key.

Make or do stuff yourself because it's satisfying, because it makes you feel good about yourself because you want to, because it'll save you money or because you have a picture in your head of something you want, but you can't find anyone who makes that thing. Do stuff yourself, just because you can. Or don't, I don't know. For me, making, fixing and / or modifying things to work for my specific purpose feels like something I have to do, because if I don't I won't be Zach anymore. So maybe all this and what follows resonates with you, or maybe it just gives you a better sense of who I am and what makes me tick.

Feelsgoodman

For my money, there’s no better feeling than "Figuring Something Out."

A close second to Figuring Something Out is becoming proficient in using the Something you Figured Out, then combining the Somethings together when working on a Task. Chain some Tasks together, and – hot dang – you’re on your way to making A Thing. A few Things get combined and then your really cooking, because now you've got a Project.

Completing a project does feel good, but more often than not, the real satisfaction comes from figuring out how to make the individual pieces and planning how to combine the pieces into a finished product. For example: For this site, it took me a couple of days to research and learn how to get the reverse proxy working correctly so that traffic would be routed to the correct Linux container. When I finally figured out that the solution was simply to:

  1. Tell the reverse proxy to send z-a-c-h.com requests to port 2368 on the other container, and
  2. Open the firewall to allow traffic on 2368,

I can recall the joy and satisfaction. I can’t say I got the same feeling when I actually got the site working as a whole (I wonder if this is because projects very rarely feel “complete”?).

The downside

That whole process can take some time: sometimes you need to figure many things out. And some times you don’t fully know what thing you’re even trying to learn how to do, so then you have to research and find a term for the thing, then learn the thing.

When building the screened in porch, I didn’t know all the terms for the pieces that the roof would be made of, so I had to do some pre-learning to learn what it was I needed to learn. After that, I had to learn how to do a thing, and then I had to learn how to do another thing...it took a long time. I mean just look at the math: You gotta add the time it takes to do the pre-learning to the time it takes to do the learning, then you multiply that value by the number of things you don’t know how to do; pretty soon it’s been a few months (add a few of those together and your porch has taken a year) --you might feel like banging your head against a wall.

Combinationalizing

Doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff is not just about computers or decks, it’s also about cars, water heaters, iPod modernization, woodworking and lots more.

When you do a bunch of stuff for the sake of it, you end up being able to utilize skills learned doing one thing in another place.

For example (lots of examples today...), while learning about CSS I started using a lot of variables, which are single root elements that can be used across lots of different files and places:

/* Variable */
:root {
--primary-text-color: #000000; 
}
:root {
link-color: var(--primary-text-color);
body-text-color: var(--primary-text-color);
other-text-color: var(--primary-text-color);
}

I can use that concept in woodworking, too. If I want a tabletop to have rounded corners, I make a single template. I then clamp that template to the first corner and use a router to cut the edge, then I do that on the second corner, and so on. On my website and for the table, I make one thing and then I use that thing to work faster and to ensure consistency. There are plenty of examples where you can take a concept you learned in one place and use it in another. Those always feel really satisfying, like your brain is really doing what it's supposed to, and you feel really smart for a few minutes until you realize you've run into another problem on the project and you have to learn something else.

Anyway

It feels good to keep learning and exercise my brain. It feels especially good to start with raw materials and make them into something, and being able to say I made or fixed something feels like my raison d'être.

Additionally, things designed and made by human hands have inherent beauty, which leads my brain down a similar but diverging path. Maybe a topic for next time.

I encourage you to try making stuff for the sake of it. Maybe even just doing stuff for the sake of it. I can’t say I have a completely valid reason for building this site, but it was challenging, sometimes fun and ultimately satisfying. As an added bonus, if more of you start making stuff we’ll have more to talk about, which will help my latent social anxiety.

Foxy The Food Critic

January was a snowy month here in Atlanta, a very rare occurrence. I was often found sitting by my simulated fireplace, consisting of a YouTube video titled “Cozy Crackling Fireplace 4k with Burning Logs: Perfect for Stress Relief and Quick” cast to the TV and my Presto HeatDish radiating onto me. If I closed my eyes, the two create an environment of cozy perfection — my ideal state. 

It’s a new year, which brings thoughts of change and a “starting anew” mentality. In the form of resolutions or exclusions, we strive for something we could not achieve in the days that slipped away from us — joining forever in communion with what is now The Past. It is interesting, really, that we do this in the dead of winter. A time when our instincts are telling us to hunker down and hibernate. Our biological clock does not register Winter as the time to start anything at all. Instead, my body is screaming to me “stay in bed,” “don’t answer the phone,” and “more carbs please.” A client and I were discussing this the other day and she pondered aloud with me, “shouldn’t we make resolutions in the Spring?” It would make much more sense, wouldn’t it? Spring, the season of new life, you’d think new beginnings would pair perfectly. But no, we have selected January, when all the leaves are dead, to be our “turning of the leaf” season. 

Our society’s norms often go against our mammalian instincts, maybe in an attempt to avoid the truth — that we are really just another animal species. A classic animal instinct I am often fighting with is habitual safety. In the modern world, where we are at the top of the food chain, this is largely represented as repetition: I don’t like watching a movie twice, and I only want to travel to cities I’ve never been to before. This applies to food, too: I’m always on the lookout for the hottest new restaurant in town, a menu change at one of my favorite spots, or a fresh recipe to try at home. I even go so far as to hope everyone orders something different when we go out to eat (and lets me have a bite). 

Yet, routine and habit is what brings a sense of safety to the human race. Isn’t that really what we all crave most? To feel safe and secure? — Do I sound like a therapist yet? In the same breath, I can seek something new and reach for something familiar. I think a lot of this push and pull comes from our ever expanding access to ~*information*~ (thank you, internet). It can feel exhausting to constantly be reminded that I haven’t “done it all.” I have spent ample time and energy researching “newness,” often forgetting and appreciating what is right in front of me. While I am not a pack rat, I certainly have lots of things that have largely gone unused — books unread, skincare products I never use, clothes I like but never wear. But even while I live daily life with all these things around me, I always seem to be longing for something I don’t yet know or have. 

So, in an effort to succumb to my animal self, I am going to put the searching to bed…in one small dimension of my life (“hear! hear! micro goals”). My Winter Challenge to myself is cooking from my cookbooks and finding joy, or at least more time and a decreased heart rate, in not reading every review for every recipe to make sure it’s the best one. Posted below are some of these cookbooks, that I very rarely use, that I will now be using. And who knows, maybe I will even learn to measure things (Zach you didn’t see this part). I’d love to know how you are engaging with your animal self this winter, feel free to share in the comments!

  1. Piddling is a slightly unfortunate term that is used in my family to describe the generic activities we do when we’re at home and not really doing anything but also not doing nothing. Piddling could be reorganizing all the charging blocks and cords, sharpening knives, looking at + thinking about the yard, etc. ↩︎
  2. I arrived at it independently ↩︎