I don’t know if I’ve made this clear in other posts, but Meg and I are absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt moving to Austin, Texas around the beginning of August. Meg will be attending the University of Texas to get her Master of Science in Sustainable Design, and I will be working full-time (yikes!) somewhere to support us.

What we are excited about:

1. warm (hot) weather
2. the unbelievable music/arts scene
3. the abnormally large number of dachschund rescues in the area
4. tacos ‘n’ BBQ
5. cowboy boots

What we are NOT excited about:

1. the cheese factor of living in a city that shares my first name
2. getting a new job
3. moving
4. finding an apartment

As our move approaches, I’ve been thinking more an more about quality of life — how easy we have it here in Cleveland, and how we might make it even better in Texas. For us, anxiety is usually only the product of Unknown Factors, and our Unknown Factors are big ones: Where To Live and Where to Work.

There was a New Yorker article on commuting a week or so ago (it coincidentally had a cool illustration of Glenn Ganges in traffic by Kevin Huizenga) that had a very practical way of looking at the Where To Live, Where To Work question:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

Our triangle here in Cleveland is pretty small: we can’t walk to work, but we can and do walk to the grocery store, to the Chipotle, to the book store. I’m hoping we can find a similar situation in Austin.

As for the job search, I have this Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon posted to the fridge:

If you are an employer — or if you know of an employer — in Austin who is looking for a writer/designer with plenty o’ computer, web design, and customer service experience…please contact me!

There was this job I had where I was working at a place called XPLANE, which was an illustration company that did these visual explanation things, and a lot of times that amounted to these diagrammatic/comics illustrations. That really got me interested in diagrams. And after thinking for a while about diagrams, the stories that I did while I worked there have a lot of diagrams in them, and that carried on through. I started collecting old science textbooks and so forth that had these nice illustrated diagrams. It made me realize that since I was in high school and Understanding Comics came out, I’ve always thought about the comics form. And something I started realizing recently is that we talk about comics being a mixture of image and text, but it really seems to me that a part of the way comics works is in this sort of diagrammatic space. You have a pictorial space, which follows certain pictorial norms, and then you have the text part of comics, which follows the syntactical structure of text and language. What comics does is it has this particular way of diagramming those things together using the panel unit and the word balloon as symbols for certain things. I really realized that that was the part of comics that appealed to me the most. When I look at other cartoonists, I think that they’re real pictorial cartoonists. They’re really interested in the image part of comics. And there are other cartoonists who are really interested in stories and the subjects we associate with literary storytelling like character, plot and so on. I realized the thing that interested me in comics is the way all of that stuff is diagrammed on the page and the way that you read it.”

- Kevin Huizenga, interview

Links:

• Kevin’s Site
• Kevin’s blog

“You look just like…”

I’ve heard Robert Downey Jr. and Donnie Darko, but now it’s “that guy who got shot last night on CSI.”

What do you say to this stuff?

I get this brand of couch potato free-associating day in and day out at the reference desk. And it’s always from someone in sweatpants. Never someone you’d actually want a compliment from.

“Thank you, I’m glad I remind you of a celebrity, even a minor one. My sense of self-worth has sky-rocketed.”

Okay, enough griping.

They have nothing to do with this post, but I like pretty much everything that Tom Gauld, Anders Nilsen, John Porcellino, and Kevin Huizenga put out.