It didn’t define who we were as a family, but it was a pliant witness to our own definition in southern California, the vessel we steered on paper routes in the San Fernando Valley, the commute to Riverside, then Anaheim Hills, then Cypress, the distance between contract work in City of Industry and classes in Irvine, the journey from Downey to anywhere. In some way, we were defined by how we interacted with the Los Angeles sprawl, how far across it we were willing to travel to grasp our ambitions.

It seems appropriate that the story of an immigrant family is not one of nobility but mobility, the nomadism etched into our DNA. In early morning hours of my childhood, my father would shine a flashlight on a driveway and me or Mikey would throw a copy of the LA Times into the target. Some people start all-nightering in college; I had my first when I was eight years old, in the bed of that truck, surrounded by newspapers. There was no air conditioning and no clock, one cupholder, and a radio with perpetually shot speakers, even after Scott and I installed a new pair (along with new headlights) in between oil changes at his house. Arguments over who would drive it and when were a feature of the thicker years of my sibling rivalry.

Angelenos are prone to defining others by the cars they drive, and at the University of Civics and Integras, the truck was an anomaly. Driving it in Orange County at odd hours of night inspired my dread of racial profiling — I have recently ceased the habit of checking my tail lights, but it was most often the falsified probable cause for traffic stops. I befriended different people, dated different women because of what I drove. If we are defined by the company we keep, the truck allowed a less materialistic conduit for my definition (that was inevitably inextricable from helping people move).

And as a family we also defined our setting. In its dents and leaks were scars of my father’s impulsiveness, my brother’s entropy, my workaholic fatigue. Depending on who was driving, the seat moved forward or backward, but the side mirrors always remained in place. Between classes I would recline in the passenger seat and take naps and awaken to find the windows fogged. In that passenger window, I could still make out the faint imprint of the original dot-matrix printed sticker. It cost my father around $11,000 when he bought it brand new in 1990. He named it Bear.

I remember the day I passed my driving test, that moment leaving Arthur’s for the Bell Gardens DMV where all those years of playing catch with a set of keys were rendered practice for that moment when two divergent schedules would make it necessary. I drove it to Las Vegas less than a month later, got a speeding ticket for going 101 mph downhill after the San Bernardino Mountains, and on the drive back home, called my mother on her vacation in New Jersey to explain why there would be a citation in the mail. The debt from that incident would deepen and lead to the start of the Spazowham Design Group. I remember picking up my father from work once after a long rush-hour commute and being angry with him for making me wait at the parking lot of his office, arguing with my mother about money and driving away. It was a vehicle of my rebellion.

I remember driving to Long Beach Airport with two suitcases in the bed in June 2005. This was the last day I would claim Bear as “my truck.” My brother called me today and told me the head gasket blew on his way to work last week. The repair would cost thousands of dollars, and he said it felt like putting the family dog to sleep. After I hung up the phone, my colleagues remarked it sounded like a pet had died, or a relative. But for an inanimate object, steel and plastic and rubber, it was special to the men of my family because in those 18 years of California traffic it seemed we spent more time with this machine than any of our friends, and perhaps with each other. It was a vehicle of our solitude.

From the Church of Christ parking lot next to that tiny Lindell Avenue apartment and the Corinthian on Florence, I moved about 3,000 miles to Washington, D.C. We’re a family awash in iPods with a son in graduate school. My mother no longer needs to work for us to make ends meet. We waste food. Over the post-mortem phone calls, I asked what’s next, if there’s another Bear in their future. Mikey’s buying his first brand-new car next week, planning to spend just a shade under $20,000. If we wanted to buy another Toyota truck, for another 18-year-run, we could.

If you ever want to quantify how far you have to go to make it in this country, for reference’s sake, my family put 258,346.6 miles on Bear. It was a vehicle of our social mobility, reminding us of where we started in 1990 as a young, fractured clan with a tenuous grasp of our new cultural context, of where we had been everyday in making ourselves (to a degree) a functional family at ease in America. Some choose to buy new cars to express their achievements to the world, to mark the level of success they enjoyed; I think we kept driving the same old truck as a reminder that we still have farther to go before we’re satisfied.

That, and to haul shit.

This is required viewing for anybody who confuses sporting a lapel pin for true patriotism (nicked from The Daily Dish). I question and doubt my government because I want it to be better, because its impact on the world is undeniable. All those baseball games where people stood respectfully and listened to a celebrity of dubious talent sing the national anthem were just practice for this moment. Eddie Izzard said about the American national anthem: “70% of what people react to is the look, you know, it’s how you look; and 20% is about how you sound; and only 10% is what you say.” But that crowd on St. Mark’s Place knew and believed 100% of what they were saying. The awkward pause before ‘banner,’ where the crowd collectively catches its breath to belt out the last three words of that phrase, gives me chills.

Courtney took this picture of me in the crowd at James Hoban’s. Even if in the future I am happily married with five children, this past Tuesday may still be one of the top 5 best days of my life.

And just as 25 years and 364 days is just a night of sleep away from 26 even, I know that though the president-elect is now preparing for the quantum leap into residence of the Oval Office, the deep, fundamental flaws that bore this cynicism and disbelief have yet to be addressed. The ecstasy that washed over crowds was just rain water; the ground supply still needs to be cleansed of its bitterness. Until then, I still worry. I’m always prepared to be let down, to be told I’m wrong again, to be part of a minority stewing over beer and waiting for vindication.

I’ve been listening to “Changes” by 2pac pretty much constantly since the morning of 5 November. My iTunes library is rarely sorted by artist, but that morning, it was, and this song was at the top of the list. I remember riding around Irvine with Rishi and Ky Vinh, this song blasting and us commenting in between laments about our respective existential crises that it was still relevant in 2005. That two lines of that song — and although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president — were rendered moot in one night is why St. Mark’s Place burst into song, why I can’t stop grinning, why I stick my tongue out at the sky not to spite the heavens but to catch a drop of rain.

After the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, I became acutely aware of how voter fraud and suppression are perpetrated and how the simple process of tallying a majority can get so damn complicated. I don’t doubt that it happened again yesterday, that there were places where voters were intimidated, places where good citizens were confused for felons, places where the vote just didn’t work. And I don’t doubt that it will happen again. I fear this is just an inherent assumption of the millennial voter.

But those practices don’t scale, not for a margin of victory like this. I undertook my birthday rituals — noodles, haircut, and more liquor than advisable — but I don’t know how to celebrate something like this, how being in a majority is supposed to feel, how to feel when something I’ve wanted for years is uncompromisingly, by law, scheduled to happen. It wasn’t just some random lesser-of-two-evils Democrat who won but the one who when I watched the DNC keynote in 2004 I knew instinctively had to be president in my lifetime.

And that instinct, over time, was confirmed with a political platform and manner reasonably proximal to mine for him to earn my vote yesterday morning. And though I may come to regret this decision in November 2012, I doubt it. I know this feeling well, perhaps too well, and for as improbable to me as that outcome is four years from now, I regret more now the times in my life I was certain of a future but unable or unwilling to defend my vision. Yesterday’s euphoria was borne of that vindication, that private victory that marked the end of my September, writ large for over 63 million people hardly a month later.

When I left the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on East Capitol Street yesterday morning, I put my headphones back on and the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow” was playing. And it asks, this time tomorrow, where will we be? This time tomorrow, what will we know?

Over dinner, I raised a glass to victories, big and small, for us to celebrate something everyday. When I left Bourbon, not even last call when Obama had finished his victory speech, I told the cab driver my address and sat silently for the ride home through a light rain. I don’t know how to celebrate something like this. All I got for my birthday was a big, stupid grin and I’m still wearing it.

I woke up at 9 am to my Umbrella Today message, half an hour ahead of my alarm. E Street was strafed with jackhammers. I’ll retire FiveThirtyEight from my daily surfing, frame the cover of my DC Voter’s Guide. And the big, stupid grin: I could get used to it.

• House Works on a Bailout — for E-Mail
  New York Times (includes a small screen cap of my work)
• House of Representatives’ Web site overwhelmed
  CNN (#1 most viewed story earlier today)
• The Day After: House E-Mail Servers Flooded with Millions of Voter E-Mails
  Dallas Morning News
• House Website Crumbles Under Weight of $700 Billion Bailout
  Wired (includes screen cap)
• Bailout Bill Overwhelms House Internet Servers
  ABC News
• U.S. House limits incoming e-mail
  Detroit Free Press
• Ailing US House website limps back to life
  Agence France-Presse
• House Deals With Unprecedented Website Troubles
  CBS News (via Politico)
• House Web site overwhelmed as bailout bill fails
  AP
• Public reaction to bailout failure jams Internet in D.C.
  The Tennessean (featuring the tragically comic “Once on the Web site, locate contact forms and phone numbers. If it doesn’t work, keep trying.“)
• U.S. House Puts Limit On Constituent Emails
  DigitalJournal.com
• House limits constituent e-mails to prevent crash
  The Hill
• House websites slowed by e-mails on bailout bill
  The Hill

And then there’s the blogosphere’s take on it.

Also, I should note that I was on the outside of this decision and that the people who made it are a group that includes my direct supervisors and others vastly above my pay grade. My contribution was actually just making that page where the error message now resides.

And I don’t agree with it at all, not when reducing the number of requests was really what would bring the situation under control, and the simplest way to do that would be to just surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. Let me repeat and italicize that seemingly revolutionary idea: surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. This is what I advocated for years. And anybody with an eye on the trends - search logs, web stats, etc. - and a long enough memory to recall the drop of the 9/11 Commission report PDF and the Mark Foley resignation (which brought down the Clerk’s site with hourly spikes two years ago, to the day) would’ve seen this coming as early as Thursday. Where the asinine triage command originated I can’t identify. It’s just unfortunate that constituents hoping to contact their representatives in earnest are the group most adversely affected (to say nothing of the group in the Infrastructure branch monitoring the servers, the legislative correspondents under the deluge, and anybody else freaking out about the arbitrary path the American government has chosen to remedy massive failures in private enterprises).

I sent over to Lou a copy of the top 20 search queries from Sunday, 28 September, and he’s posted it to the Search Analytics blog at Rosenfeld Media. I intend to follow through with this research (off the top of my head: “bailout” was the top query starting on 23 September, “Barney Frank,” “email,” and “contact” each cracked the top ten in days preceding), not that it’ll make a dint of change in my employers’ minds. It’s just nice to know, as time passes, as I’m now well into my fourth year of employment, that I haven’t lost my ability to think beyond what this job requires - rote production of kilobytes of rhetorical fluff - and about what this situation requires.

I wonder what legislative change, if any, this will prompt. Granted the House has pressing issues on the floor but this is just embarrassing. Can the paradigm with which lawmakers have approached the World Wide Web - mid-’90s stamp of technology adopted for its own sake - be shifted into something more appropriately modern by passing a law? That remains to be determined, although I’d like to help write that legislation, if only to actually guide and assist instead of just saying “I told you so” years after the fact. Not that it isn’t fun to say.

I told you so.

Design is inherently a practice of problem solving, and the problem was that in a brawl of brutes, Kristy, Patrick, and I would not be favored against these two. (How many pitchers of Coors would I have to imbibe over how many decades to be at once that intimidating and pathetic? There’s a Fermi problem for you.) But designers never solve problems in vacuums (unless you’re James Dyson, but I digress). Our solutions must always follow contextual parameters, and if you’re resourceful, in those parameters lie the keys to those solutions.

I immediately surveyed the room for a pool table — none. No pool cues or balls. Cues can make clumsy weapons, but they’re effective for creating a defensive radius while employing a projectile offense. In any case, no need bring out the amphibious invasion strategy guide for a landlocked country.

Liquor bottles can be dangerous either as projectiles — they’re heavy enough to have a predictable trajectory — or lacerating weapons — though there’s a high likelihood of injuring oneself as well as an opponent if employing a bottle as a breakaway club. I wanted to harness a beer tap — solid wood and built to grip. It would be the closest thing to a Major League Baseball bat readily available. Patrick mused that one could brand an opponent’s face with the etched-metal Magic Hat #9 tap.

Kristy and I were working on wine, but Patrick had beer served in an acrylic pitcher and glass mug. Hold the bowl of the mug inside the fist (loosely so it won’t shatter) with the thick glass handle facing outward — aim for the teeth. With a hand wrapped in cloth napkins and holding the acrylic pitcher, one of us could distract with a splash of beer and follow it with devastating plastic battery. Aim for the neck.

The tchotchkes on the walls, the contents of the speed rack, lonely drinkers in dubious football jerseys, failing pickup artists, girls-night-out girls, bartenders and bouncers — all contextual parameters, all potentially problematic and indispensable to the solution. There was no way to consider all the possible outcomes and iterations and the half-price cabernet wasn’t a boon to scenario planning. Besides, I tend to favor diplomacy: solve the problem by negating its existence.

But Patrick and I agreed: we’d both, inexplicably, wanted to be party to a bar fight. These two guys with their asinine burger orders (just say ‘medium well,’ no need to explain the physical properties of charcoal) and jingoistic politics who’ve probably been in bar fights before have won some and lost some and lived to tell. Maybe they go out looking for a fight; maybe bad beer does that to a man.

For me, for as much as being a designer requires a thorough understanding of context, often in the form of immersion, it is also characterized by a kind of academic remove. It’s just research, just business. And so often, I just negotiate, compromise, move on to the next job. But one day soon, I’ll skip that diplomacy stage and just solve a problem in the thick of it — wield a beer tap, maybe kick some ass, maybe take a beer mug to the teeth. Because bar fights, day jobs, love — it’s all in the context. And soon, I’ll knock ‘em all out.

Packaging, no matter how sleek, is ultimately disposable, and laptop users who pay the premium for a portable computer already consider the investment of an additional piece of luggage that’ll keep it safe from office to home, subway to sidewalk, journey to destination (and that piece of luggage will have its own packaging, to be sure). The packaging and the messenger bag serve the same purpose for manufacturers and end-users respectively — to protect the computer from damage in transit — so if one designs a unit that serves both audiences, it’s that much less raw material consumed in the process.

And marketers also score a victory, a substantial one at that. It gives them more leverage because the product packaging, if used as intended, continues to promote the brand even after the owner calls it a day at the coffee shop. I find the prominent logo displayed on the bag problematic since it easily identifies it as the container of a computer, increasing its likelihood of being stolen and bordering on conspicuous consumption. I understand the compromise from a marketing perspective, but I advocate taking a more stealthy approach — one that HP has actually done with some success with its “The computer is personal again” campaign that shrewdly excluded celebrities’ faces from their endorsements. Screw the logo, let’s see business-class models shipped out in carbon-fiber or aniline leathers, student editions wrapped in cotton duck and wool felt, and of course, limited-edition collaborations — imagine Halliburton Zero × Lenovo ThinkPad and Mulberry × MacBook Air (Coach × Dell seems sadly inevitable) — stamped by the starchitect du jour, touted on NotCot, destined for eBay.

I expect the trend will continue, and though the HP Pavilion dv6929 in its aquarium-printed sling may ultimately be a middling computer in an obvious container, its precedent will hopefully (and I think likely) be followed in more sophisticated execution. Well, it better be, or else I’m going to end up with a bunch of crappy looking bags sitting around my apartment from computers through the years, given that’s the form computers continue to assume.

There were my brown years, the days I resembled UPS livery. And overlapping that time in my work were the purple days (months, rather, just after the oranges), which yielded lilacs and aubergines and ubes and all shades between. Not that any of this work was published as intended, because unfortunately, the stigmas associated with the hue outweighed in the eyes of clients what I felt was its singular grandeur. Because I never considered colors property, I never thought that gays or monarchs exclusively claimed purple, and damn those (lots of people) who thought otherwise. My own interpretation of it — assertive as cardinal without the abrasiveness, cool as cobalt without the inertness — is what I ascribe to its users, and more specifically, wearers.

And soon, they’ll be everywhere. There is a fourth thing about the sign, that the wearer has considered all of this and then embarked on finding it in their size and clearly didn’t give up as seasons passed and it still didn’t materialize. And this could be that season when it does, trendy as it may be. But as seasons pass, there’ll be other colors and so many aubergine overcoats will remain closeted and the status quo will re-emerge, and those just-so strange souls will make themselves known, on bicycles, cigarette in hand, as dry ochre foliage rains around us.

And in the meantime, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to introduce myself to strange women.

Between Once and Man on Wire, there’s an undercurrent in my choice of cinema this past weekend of little things — pop songs and filament-tied-to-an-arrow — urged by good-humored gamines and can-do cads toward the seemingly impossible. I’m not in touch with most of my mentors from five or six years ago (and in some cases not on speaking terms), but I sense they’d smile knowingly at the return on their investments of encouragement and time (if not straight cash), the dividends paid to progeny. I didn’t know then clearly who I was or what was next, but their guidance in entrepreneurship, design practice, and, let’s face it, psychological warfare — and away from hourly retail in indistinct suburbs, indefinitely — capitalized the belief that I was meant to transcend the path my history implied, make great art, write a killer thesis, see the world. And lately, though it’s been a difficult belief to sustain, I’m here. The band’s in the studio; the cable’s between the towers.

It’s daybreak, and it’s time to dance.