Attention Inventory: Extinct Salt, A Tailored Trouser, Archival Storage
This month's audit of what is distracting me
A running list of what's been holding/occasionally ambushing my attention this month.
Moon Archives:
Attention Inventory - full archive
February Prompts for Read Receipts
1. GOLDIE’S BASKETBALL TEAM
My seven-year-old niece, Goldie, started playing on a basketball team this season. Michael went to one of the games while he was visiting and called me afterward to recap: Pure chaos.
Tiny kids hyper-focused on their own velocity. Staring at their feet, sprinting full-speed down the court toward nothing. Holding the ball, then forgetting what comes next… just standing there, bobbing in place. Shooting into either team’s basket. Shooting anywhere but the basket. At one point the ball was launched with such conviction that it wedged in the gym rafters and multiple parents had to be recruited as a response unit, using broom handles to dislodge it.
Total commitment, zero strategy.
This is the exact willingness and unselfconscious verve I suggest we bring into the Year of the Horse; I am wishing you a year of shooting your shot!
2. WORKDAY MOTIVATION
Notable finds:
Spiraling, Skinky-like notepads, made from deadstock/recycled paper by a family-run printer in LA.
Archival book boxes. Around here, we go Museum Grade only.
A dream drafting desk inside the Ljubljana home studio of Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik. (“The house is marked by the master’s constant research spirit and asceticism, and many an architectural experiment turned out to be the right solution for his later work. In his report to Suhadolc, Plečnik himself calls his house an ‘experimental hotbed.’”)
3. TASTING NOTES
A nearly extinct pre-colonial Filipino salt, made by a handful of remaining families in Bohol. The process takes months: coconut husks soaked in seawater by the mangrove, burned to ash, filtered, boiled down in clay pots over a wood fire until the pot cracks open to reveal a solid orb of salt. It looks like a dinosaur egg and (apparently) tastes like the sea ran through a fire.
Treats:
