I made an ugly bowl, please clap

and other self-indulgent reflections

Welp, it’s finally happening, folks. Very gradually, I can feel myself shapeshifting into a unrecognizable figure with a suspiciously positive, optimistic, and dare I say, serene aura. A recent trip back to the East Coast has me reflecting on the ease at which I can flip a switch and return to my historically accurate self; an unmitigated sinkhole of nihilistic anxiety cosplaying as a human being. It’s like how going back to your childhood home brings out your most horrifying teenage qualities. (For the record, neither of these temporary transfigurations are ones that I’m proud of.)

The last of the tomatoes, for real this time

The upside of this sunken feeling is that my newfound vigor is unmistakable upon returning home to check in on my little tomatoes, cook my little meals, and live my silly little life. I still think a lot about whether Portland is my ‘forever home’, and if such a thing even exists for me. Not to get too earnest on main (wait… should this be the name of my newsletter?), but I think the most compelling argument is that I’m the version of myself I like best here, which seems fundamentally important to living a good life, whatever that may entail.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s the additive or subtractive changes to my life that are acting as the cornerstones of this new foundation. Probably a little bit of both? Does it even matter?

A match striker, the neatest thing I’ve made so far

A new anchor I seem to be grounding myself with lately is pottery. I took a 6 week intro to wheel class in the summer, and I’ve since become a member of a studio. I’m exceptionally bad at it, and it feels amazing.

There are a lot of new-ish to me activities I’m spending more time doing since moving, but amongst them, pottery is uniquely rooted in real-time skill. You can’t really be bad at hiking, failing at gardening takes place slowly, over the course of seasons — I can, and will, ruin a bowl on the wheel in seconds, if I can even get it centered to begin with.

Trimming my first ever foot

Given that I do technically possess a degree focused on the design of mass produced objects, earned through years of sketching, model making, and refining forms, you’d think I’d be slightly better with my hands… but alas, I was never that capable to begin with, and a decade of drawing boxes on a screen has dulled whatever proficiency I may have once had¹. If and when I do get better, I want to focus on making vases (to pair with my budding interest in growing flowers, of course) and special use case tableware.

There are two rose gardens on the way to the studio, restorative in and of itself

It’s also been great to establish a bit of a routine, the nature of the medium requires developing a cadence to let things dry (but not too much), trim, fully dry, bisque fire, glaze, glaze fire — all of which means frequent visits to the studio, no more than a few days apart. I’m enjoying the walking commute, and meandering through the well tended gardens of SE Portland. This is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time (lol at finally getting off the Brooklyn Clay waitlist weeks before a global pandemic began), so it’s also the intentional closing of a loop of sorts.

A preemptively made potters mark that I absolutely will have to redo — my signature is just so awful I kept on ruining otherwise nice pots

Cooking / baking has been the primary skill-based thing I’ve poured into over the last… decade? Can that be right? And while I still have much to learn, it’s quite rare that something totally flops in the kitchen². Likewise, it’s getting harder and harder to find things I want to make that challenge my skillsets in that initial, ‘first learning how to cook’ kind of way. Want is doing a lot of work in that sentence — I have no interest or competency in molecular gastronomy, for example.

A consequence of spending so much time in the studio is that I’m cooking significantly less; there’s something about extensive use of your hands in one domain that limits enthusiasm in another hand-heavy pursuit. I’m trying to alternate ceramics M/W/F, cooking projects T/T… I’m sure that relationship will flip as the walk to the studio gets less pleasant in the colder months.

The first thing I ever fired 🥹, it has a little sauce moat

I think it’s also somewhat important to be bad at something publicly. The chronic folly of the designer and/or creative professional is squirreling away in private, not willing to share whatever they’ve been working on until it’s perfect. This newsletter has been a good first step in reversing years of such conditioning³ — believe me, I am self-aware enough to understand how conventionally ‘cringe’ these updates are — but something about working in the physical realm scratches a different type of itch.

An attempt at marbling clay

I’m not really sure what I’m on about, I suppose I occasionally contain thoughts that extend beyond growing vegetables and what my next meal will be. Some of that long promised existential crisis content, perhaps? I’ve been thinking, and talking, a lot about the personal urgency I feel to shift from a life centered on consumption to one rooted in creation⁴. I don’t need to get into the particular elements of this capitalistic hellscape we inhabit that I find disheartening; if you’re reading this, I’m quite certain you’re intimately familiar with them. But I’ll say: regardless of where status, wealth, and material success stand on your list of theoretical or lived priorities, it’s draining to exist in a context where their relentless pursuit is so normalized, if not expected. I’m really doubling down on my ‘protecting my peace’ arc, in part because I feel like there are no other rational choices.

There’s a special kind of restlessness reserved for people so deeply committed to getting in their own way. As much as I want to be well, I’m not quite sure wellness sits right on me. It drapes over my body like an oversized sweater, waiting for me to grow in the right places to fill it out. I guess I find myself in some third, amorphously content state; not well or unwell but forever approaching well, perpetually a growth spurt away from figuring it all out. This is a criminal over simplification — as if the human condition could be reduced to three bits — but whatever comically small step in this journey that making things with my hands again represents seems inexplicably important to me.

Regrettably, it’s giving “tech bro discovers hobbies”, but I hope you’ll give me some reasonable amount of grace in your interpretation of this navel-gazing tirade.

To end on a pragmatic note: I’m soliciting ceramic gift requests, so if you need something that is... under 2 lbs and less than 12” tall (the current upper limits of my throwing skills), please let me know.

Covered in clay dust,

R

1. The irony is not lost on me that the UX designer → amateur potter pipeline is bursting at the seams, truly the most dime a dozen thing I could possibly get into

2. I’ve had at least two disastrous bakes between drafting and publishing this — stay humble

3. As it pertains to my personal life. I’m very comfortable sharing awful work, early and often, in a professional setting

4. In general, I think the term “creativity” is overloaded, and often used as a proxy for some other deep-seated desire for self expression. In this case, I mean nothing quite as profound — I’ve relinquished the idea of being a “creative person” a very long time ago