Washington DC’s Cherry Blossoms are in bloom so I head down to the tidal basin, picnic in hand, to host my own hanami party. It’s of course not on the scale of the sakura in Japan, but it’s a neat little walk all the same.

On my plate: ambiance and miso-glazed sea bass with house-made sweet chili sauce, nishiki rice, and baby bok choy from TenPenh. The complete meal consisted of vegetarian spring rolls with three dipping sauces (including black vinegar and spicy sesame), the sea bass, five-spice chocolate cake a la mode, and a surprisingly delicious mocktail with cranberry and pineapple juice, sprite, and passionfruit puree. All in all a worthwhile venture. Long live Restaurant Week.

I make videos for a living, and I’d like to think I’ve got some skill in the arena. I absolutely love what I do, and this means I also make videos for fun. So I’ve had a bit of a problem on my hands for some time now. If you do any creative work, you may have found yourself in the same pickle, and I don’t envy you one bit.

A passion is a wonderful thing, but making your living by your passions presents some pretty unique obstacles. For example, my head is always brewing one thousand new, wonderful ideas, from the documentary on live action role-play I’m currently babysitting in preproduction to the time-lapse exploration of DC I’d like to complete, but after eight hours of working on somebody else’s film five days a week, coming home to work on my own is often the last thing on my mind. There are errands that need to be run instead and more pressing business to attend to then the several hours it would take to log my own footage or research a better microphone in my price range. Yet, the ideas still come, and it wouldn’t be a passion if I didn’t feel compelled to act on my ideas. It’s the curse of the passionate.

I’ve written in the past about my filmic frustrations, and while I know those words were little more than the fit of a petulant and impatient toddler refusing to eat broccoli, there was some truth behind it. I don’t want to make the kinds of films most people make. But what I didn’t realise was that I actually did. Well, I wanted the same production value. I wanted the decent budgets and the generous timeline and the collaborative process and a little bit of the film festival ego stroking. To put it another way, because I make my living doing video production and postproduction, I know more than the average joe about everything from timecodes and framerates to solid state recorders and mini mols. I know how to frame a shot and I know how to edit for continuity and I know how to mic an actor. So why don’t I do it in my own films?

That’s a complicated question. To make a high-value work, you need a lot of things (e.g., aforementioned budgets, timelines, and collaborative geniuses), and I’ve been wanting the high-value work without putting in the effort. Take my most recent film idea: a video log, or vlog. It’s not a novelty; I’ve been blogging for years and don’t plan on stopping now, I’m already actively involved in social networks, and I’d love nothing more than to jump on the new media bandwagon. I travel a lot, I’m interested in video, and I think I have something to say. Sounds like a perfect fit, right? So why did it take me a whole year to get it together? I didn’t got to the store.

More specifically, I didn’t got to the store because I was sure they’d be out of milk. Did I call to check? No. Did I go to the dairy counter and ask? No. Did I decide I could eat cereal sans milk? No. I just stopped buying groceries in case there wasn’t any milk at the store. It seems absurd when you look at the analogy, but in my brain it seemed perfectly logical to not bother even starting a film if I didn’t think I’d have any of the resources required to “do it right.” I wouldn’t bother to shoot anything because I knew the audio would be subpar, the framing off (it’s hard to shoot yourself without being able to see your shot!), the exposure wacky, the music mixed wrong, the graphics shoddy, the story weak, and any number of self-depricating reasons I could manufacture to put off ever starting. Then I realised how insane it was to stop making movies of any variety because I couldn’t light it well. Hello?! the critical studies side of me shouted to the rest of my mind. What you say is more important than how you say it. True, but instead of saying something, anything, I stopped talking at all to avoid my stutters and mispronunciations, or in filmic terms I stopped making video to avoid the inevitable concessions I would have to make if I wanted to get the project done. This was not just an inconvenience because, as Chris Wanstrath can tell you of creative work, when you kill off your side projects, you’re effectively killing your joy.

My standards were bogus. First of all, this is the Internet we’re talking about. That’s my audience: the people who gave us the Star Wars Kid and Snakes on a Plane. This is the land of Rick Roll’d, All Your Base, and Two Girls, One Cup. People talk into the camera for eleven minutes straight and still get subscribers. Dooce writes about putting her baby in a cardboard box and has one of the most well-known mommy blogs out there. Needing to have the next great indie sleeper hit before I’d put it on YouTube is the definition of bogus. It’s still true that I don’t want to make Must Love Dogs, but I’ve decided to let go of the production quality. Second of all, thinking I’ll ever have the time, means, and will to devote to my side projects is idealistic to the point of insanity. It’s more important that I make movies again than it is that they be the ideal movies in my head, since that state is pretty much unachievable anyway. Comparing what I am about to make to some ungrounded idea in my head is ridiculous. So, I’ve lowered the bar. Make a movie, production value be damned. Let it be out of focus. Let it be shaky and noisy and grainy. Who cares if it’s only roughly edited, or if the music doesn’t fit? My prioritisation was all out of whack. First, make the movie, then worry about how it looks. Move the energy, make more films, and improve that way, not by painstakingly deliberate scrutiny. What my film actually does counts infinitely more than what it could have done, and what it says is what matters, not what I said it would say. Spend more time focusing on what you’ll be doing on camera than what you’re doing with the camera.

Once I stopped cutting myself off, my vlog started to pick up speed. Having actually made a few of them has only reaffirmed how much more meaningful it is to have gotten them done that having them golden beautiful gems of genius that lived only in my head. It’s been a journey, and I’d like to share the first of what I hope will be many. I do “know better” than the shitty camerawork and crappy audio, but that’s not what matters. I did it. That’s what counts. With any luck, I’ll have learned enough about bogus standards, absurd reactions, and the importance of regularly nurturing my creative spirit that I’ll keep on doing it and it will keep on counting. That’s the dream.

Fall has come to Virginia

Growing up we were a two-part meal family. Aside from the occasional one-pot chili bowl, for the most part it would not be presumptuous to expect an appetizer with your entree, and coffee with your dessert. Going out to eat was always a splendid, patient affair complete with aptertifs (my sister and I learned to love the Shirley Temple during this inclusive cocktail hour), pressed white linen serviettes sometimes in fanciful shapes, and conversation to outlast our lengthy restaurant stay. It was over these candlelit tables that I learned to navigate any menu and, following my father’s lead, order the best item, to ask the right questions about a dish’s composition or seasonality, to perfect the art of sustained conversationalism from a ripe young age, and to appreciate slow food at its best, cultivating an adventurous tongue and forgiving intestines out of my family’s persistent and generous food education.

Of course dinner at home was hardly a sordid affair; I have the great fortune of not one but two culinarily-capable parents engrossed in the pastime: my father a resourceful foodie born with New England sensibilities, European taste buds, and a love of leftovers that I aspire to adapt, and my mother a fully-baked mix of southern blooded debutante raised on soul food vegetables and French-ranked gourmand who keeps a counter covered in baked goods at all times, who both have passed on their passions and know-how to their daughters, who in turn dabble in the kitchen with equal fervor, my sister fed by flour and yeast and I fueled by farmers markets. It’s quite a legacy to behold when you look it, and even more intense when you put us all in a room together.

It’s unclear to me whether my respect and adoration for good foods of all calibres — there’s nothing like a properly prepared Grande Mariner souflee, but then again not much beast a felafel kebab when your mouth is dry and your stomach empty and your clock says it’s too late for such antics — came from my family and their food passions or from my own experiences. Certainly the best part of travel for me is the gastronomic adventures I embark upon, be it breakfast sushi in Tokyo, bread in Berlin, or, as my latest adventure saw me, mussels in Brussels, but my convictions surrounding diet are equally impressive, if not altogether formidable. You’ve seen countless pictures of what’s on my plate and in my kitchen and read numerous posts about my obsession with cooking, baking, and eating, so it should come as no surprise to discover that I simply cannot comprehend why anyone skimps on food.

I understand that, when forced to cut corners in your life, food is on the list, and I wholeheartedly agree with keeping your grocery bill reasonable given your particular means, but for the life of me, I don’t understand why food is so often the first to go and not the last. Even when I was a broke university student in an expensive city I’d spend my last penny at the supermarket. I’d shop smartly, and generically, but people would look at my not pre-sliced cheese and bakery bread and basket of greens and cluck their tongues, like it was a luxury only I could afford, never mind that produce is the cheapest thing you can get at a supermarket and that my cheese cost the same as a box of instant macaroni or hamburger helper and would last me thrice as long. No, eating right and cooing well is only for the lucky. Please. As if.

You are what you eat, but you’re so much more. Food is your fuel, it becomes your skin and hair and sweat, it can turn a place into a home, it can show gratitude or devotion, it can cease a runny nose or comfort a lonely soul, it can make and recall memories stronger than anything else. A slice of my mum’s apple pie and I feel twelve again, the smell of my dad’s crab casserole and I know I’m home, the crunch of a taco and I instantly remember the faces and taco orders of all my friends back in Texas, the aroma of cornbread grounds me like a good night sleep. Take in these sights and smells and tastes. Relish them. Long for them. Learn to recreate them, or if you cannot, learn to seek them out. Sample everything. Because food is so much more than just food.

Admittedly, I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten how wonderful a slow meal in good company is. I’d forgotten how to take my time and savour every bite. I’d forgotten how food used to inspire me, not sit silently like a task on my to-do list. I’d forgotten about the relationship between food and community, the kind of honesty you just can’t find in a McDonald’s or California Pizza Kitchen. It’s a beautiful thing and I never thought I’d lose track of it. Remembering all this has overshadowed so much of my attention lately, and for good reasons, since finding my path back to the kitchen has been so much more glorious than I remember the place being. And it was Brussels that brought me back.

My whole childhood I’ve been informed in an unshakable deadpan by multiple relatives that Belgium has hands down the best food in the world. It’s easy to see why this opinion was law in my family. Couple regional specialties with French dining values, Dutch home cooking, and a wide mix of European influences and you get a gem of a culinary culture and one hell of a food scene. But it’s not just the impeccable Belgian blanche brews or the ethereal quality of the chocolateries, the incredible quality of the humble waffle stand or the mastery understated in a plate of frites with mayonnaise fritesausse, it’s the fact that there are so many unique Belgian specialties. It says to me, we don’t just do on thing well, we do everything well. Everything with passion, with an eye to detail, with a standard of quality, whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner, dessert, drink or snack. It says, quite loudly, quite repeatedly, that we value food. From the taste of the food in Brussels, it’s pretty hard to argue any differently. With each coffee I sipped, each chocolate I nibbled, each plate of something new and exciting I sampled, I remembered that I used to value food this way too.

I have been quite busy the last four months, adjusting to life in DC and getting myself set up here across the country on an entirely opposite coast, and as a result I have taken most of my meals without much thought, quietly even, in my very own kitchen. Since my return from Belgium, I have attended three sumptuous meals with a fresh mouth: a sushi feast at Momo in Old Town (by far the best sushi in Virginia), a simple but scrumptious Italian affair at Pizzaiolo in Del Rey (unbelievable wood fired pizzas), and some classic tapas at La Tasca in Penn Quarter (you can never go wrong with manchego and honey). I must say, though the costs were undoubtedly a splurge for me, especially given the frequency, the quality was superb and the experience, previously forgotten, was worth far more to me than just the cost of a meal. Eating out is certainly a luxury, but rarely is it about the food itself or even about the costs of eating it, it’s about a quality of life. The food is always tastier when you’re free the burdens of preparing and cleaning, and there are more than enough eateries in DC with the high quality food to boot. DC has the coffee shops and the produce and the posh bars in spades, but it’s my responsibility to live out the quality of life I hold dear. I consider myself well versed in the art of healthy cooking and of course gourmet tastes; I realise I am one of the few, especially considering my still green age, who appreciates not just the food, but the context, community, and the culture behind it. The road back to the dining room is no longer second nature to me, but it’s lined with delicious restaurants, seasonal fare, and an exciting new slice of local culture to delve into, and I’m just following my nose, excited about heading home.

Do not for one moment try to tell me that football (or soccer for some of us) is anything but the world’s best sport. It’s a game with enough big names to constantly draw a crowd and enough community-originated clubs to spark serious competition. As it was once said to me, “Rugby is an animal’s sport played by gentlemen, while football is a gentlemen’s sport played by animals.” Players ears may not be ripped off during play, but man will a footballer take a hit for the team. It’s fun to play, fun to watch, fun to follow; with sentiments such as these it’s no wonder my favourite feel-good movie is Goal! the Dream Begins. I think it’s the best sport in the world.

World Cup Allianz Arena

I suppose you could say I’m something of a football nut, though I pale in comparison to, say the Screaming Eagles or the Gunner Hooligans, but it’s the one sport unathletic me actually participated in willfully during my youth, I’m competent enough to argue the merits of a foul with any Brit, and I do piously follow Manchester United, even when it involved getting up at 6:00 on a Saturday morning when I lived in LA, or if it meant watching the game in Spanish, as I had to in my last apartment, or waiting until tea time to take my lunch break and surreptitiously setting my browser to auto-refresh ESPN Soccer Net every 15 seconds. While I’d never care to even check the scores for the World Series, I check the EPL, MLS, and UEFA standings daily, and though I may politely decline an invitation to watch ice hockey, I’ve yet to turn down a ticket to a football match.

Americans tend to only have one or two things to say on the subject of football, namely that the US’s entry for the World Cup is always embarrassing, and that it isn’t a fast enough game. There have been numerous lobbies to change the rules so that we might better get behind the league; among the more preposterous suggestions have been to widen the goals, to disallow a draw as the final score, to incorporate instant replay, to abolish overtime, and other such stabs in the dark that fight a simple truth. Football hasn’t caught on in the US.

F.C. Bayern fans swarming the metro station post-game

Oh the American clubs have fans, they have lots of fans, and in fact the four largest fan bases are the Seattle Sounders, the Houston Dynamo, the Chicago Fire, and DC United in the MLS, who tend to pull consistent attendance at their home matches. The difference is scale. Look a little closer and it will come as no surprise that the fanbase of all four teams is predominately of latin descent. There’s nothing wrong if the majority of American soccer fans are hispanic-Americans, but it does suggest there’s something about the game that the rest of the population is missing. The Superbowl is our biggest television event of the year, and yet the world’s biggest, grandest, toughest, and most universal sport is all but outright ignored. Even here on the east coast, where Chelsea fans have their own satellite radio channel and AC Milan fans get discounts at certain clubs, it’s often hard to find a broadcast of whatever team you follow during the World Cup qualifiers. The world’s most famous footballer, David Beckham himself, still couldn’t draw a crowd playing for the LA Galaxy, and I know several Australians who would have sold their kidneys to see him play for thirty seconds, over the hill or not. All this can be maddening to us big fans of the game, leaving us only the Big Four and a few other international powerhouses to follow while teams like Hull CIty might as well be fictional for all the recognition they inspire.

D.C. United at the US Open Cup

But you go to a game, and much the same way being in the stadium transforms painfully dull baseball into an exciting sport, being at an MLS game can make you feel okay about America’s humble take on the age-old sport. Of course there are more empty seats, and our team cheers may be piecemeal from Latin America, England, and Italy, but there are still a few hooligans and a few ruffians and a few glorious moments when the crowd unites in horror or in honour alike. That’s what the sport is all about, isn’t it? We form these rivalries, and pay these deathmatches, but it’s really about uniting under the sport. In the olden days, so I am informed, football was a way for racial tension and economic rifts to be played out, making it one of the most aggressive and at times socially charges sports out there. Patrick Kluivert makes an offhand comment about an all-black dutch team and the league goes haywire because we’re still trying to wrestle our social problems into submission on the pitch.

Practicing in Parca de la Ciutadella in Barcelona

It’s not an inferior game here in America, it’s just a different one. Sure the players have less stamina (as was apparent watching DC United take on Real Madrid earlier this summer), and probably worse handling, but the technique and the strategy are entirely different. They should be, because to play in an MLS bracket like you’re in the Champion’s League or Serie A would be as unwise as it would be ridiculous. So stop depreciating American football as a failure of a great institution and start accepting it as a new take on an old protocol. Sure in the Bundasliga and the Premiere League you get large bank accounts and at least 6 million viewers tuning in every week, but then you also get some players that get the large bank account and the 6 million fans an start playing for them instead of for their team. American footballers aren’t heroes over here, and while they’re underrated, they also play a different game. We may not have any Jermain Defoes or Cristiano Ronaldos or Adrian Mutus, but we’re in our own league, which is in so many ways just as close to the park pickup game and to the crosstown mining town rivalries as the lesser leagues in the European game.

A Hanover fan waits intently for a goal

I’m a fan. A football fan. I’m a die-hard fan of the Red Devils, but after a few games cheering along with the Barra Brava I think I might become a respectful DC United fan too. I’ve always found it trying, following Man U from over here, knowing that I’m missing a much-needed dimension of sport by sufficing games via 1D radio or web update, and the occasional 2D TV cast when available, and having a home team to root for and a stadium to call home, colours to wear, chants to shout, it’s a nice feeling. I’m tired of everyone turning their nose up at American soccer. It’s time to stop denying us the pleasure of the only true universal sport and time to start cheering us on!

A cup of coffee is a marvelous thing with its luxurious taste, equalising aura, and built-in performance boosts. Whether you’re sipping a cafe au lait, making your way through a flat white, savouring a cappucino, or waiting for a double shot half-caff mocha latte with soy milk, the thousands of different coffee permutations make it the stuff of legends that offer instant inspiration. Without such coffee innovation we wouldn’t get the espresso, or the mint mocha chip ice cream variety, or the tiramisu. It seems to me quite fitting then that such an incredible substance warrants its own, separate location for consumption.

Given the seemingly universal appeal of coffee, it comes as no surprise that coffee shops are also magical places. Every time I find myself amongst old friends, we always meet up at one of the numerous local coffee shops for half price cake night and a bottomless cup of the house blend. I’ve met up with business partners and employers at several corner coffee spots and often failed to keep my poor tongue unburnt in my attempts to keep up. I cannot tell you how many of my first dates have been for a multi-hour cup of coffee and perhaps slice of pie or how many times I’ve gone there to get some work done by my lonesome. Nowadays coffee shops are becoming synonymous with internet access, clean bathrooms, cheap refills, free outlets, and indie hipster lounge music. Yet the spirit of the coffee shop remains untarnished.

There a few universal givens in a coffee shop anywhere, anytime. The longer it takes to prepare, the better it usually tastes. There will be comfy chairs for you to sprawl all over, and though you may have to fight for it, enough casual courtesy to imply you can safely use the toilet without worrying about someone usurping your seat. Maybe the beverage menu is large, maybe it’s small. Maybe there’re fancy drinks on it or discerning descriptions about where each blend is from and what its defining Charactersitics are. Perhaps it’s just a four-item list handwritten and slightly smeared on a chalkboard reading “Coffee, Decaf, Espresso, Hot Chocolate, 2.50/e.” Maybe your coffee house has some quirks, say a series of beat-up bookshelves filled with take-one-leave-one used classics, or a stack of old-school board games you haven’t played since Timmy Borden’s 11th birthday party. But it will always have a strong cup of coffee waiting for you, and if you’re lucky a spot in the shade and a barista that knows your name and favourite orders by heart.

Regardless of your agenda when you walk into the coffee shop, the characters are the same everywhere. There’s always some guy on his mobile or laptop talking loudly enough to annoy everyone who hasn’t already tripped over his power cable. The homeless guy in the corner who refuses to give up his table is inevitable, as is the seemingly endless and grating laugh of the girl on an awkward date. Somehow, the place still manages to feel serene. Maybe it’s the anonymity granted by holding a book or newspaper, or the obliging space you receive the moment you put on your headphones and open your notebook You could call it social etiquette, or you could call it self-involvement, but I think coffee houses have their own entirely separate set of rules of engagement.

It’s quite remarkable when you think about it, how thirty or so people gather at one place at one time, yet rarely acknowledge one another in this space. Coffee houses thrive on the assumption that everyone has something else to do and somewhere else to be. Whether you’re that guy on his bluetooth headset yammering away in line or if you’re that girl smoking and talking about why Hemmingway was a fascist and you’ll show the world just as soon as you finish your novel, if you’re that mum who’s just stopped in for a morning beverage before going about her day, or if you’re that intern that just popped down the street to take a brake from all the interoffice politics forced on him. We’re all in transition.

So the coffee house, the protector of the bohemian and the facilitator of the businessman alike, is nothing more than a halfway house, a layover for fuel in a world of thesis deadlines, skype calls, reading lists, and chatty mates. It’s an empty space for us to fill with our beverage orders yes, but with our plans for the future as well. With our word, our aspirations, our next ten-minute action plan. It’s a break from space and time where we focus on old-world values: genuine relationships with other people, creative development, intellectual debate and curiosity, hard work that results in progress instead of procrastination. So it’s a halfway house for cultural values too, a meeting point of the old and the new, of the traditional practices and the new models. After all, coffee shops have been around for what seems like eons, and when we’re told that democracy was forged in a coffee shop, that masterpieces were penned among a smattering of empty cups, that revolutions were born on the kinds of fourtops and twotops I use every week, I have no problem picturing it. Coffee shops are blank canvases, which is where they get their power, but they’re also meeting points and by nature turnpikes that can either turn you around or spit you right back out the way you came. They’re trickier than we give them credit for.

I spent my first afternoon wandering aimlessly around Adams Morgan this past weekend, and after browsing the menus of the scores of coffee shops the neighbourhood has to offer, it occurred to me that the loss of adequate coffee shop culture — the dearth of oversized armchairs, the wrong kind of music, and no idiosyncrasies in sight — was a larger factor in how lost I felt in Los Angeles than I’d given credit to. I was lucky enough to come of age in a land abundant with choice coffee spots: Artiste by the grassy Millenium Park where we played oh so many games of Ultimate Frisbee and perused the Menil Collection, Empire with its gourmet brunches and “customer of the week” competition to win free coffee, Brazil’s patio imbued with so much ambiance it was hard not to spend hours at a time there, Agora and her smoky second floor that was well worth braving for the free live jazz on Fridays and bluegrass on Tuesdays. I had no shortage of coffee houses, tea shoppes, and boba/juice bars just down the street from me, and until I was deprived of the space, I came to see how a vegetarian sandwich option or mismatching cups and saucers could repurpose my work with more zeal than hacking at it anywhere else ever could. When the conditions are right, I am unstoppable.

I don’t need much; I don’t need ultra-fancy furniture or uber-hip lighting. I need a good cup of hot coffee or tea and a decent place to sit. I was instantly comforted by the volume of such places as I walked just a few blocks into the district. The mere presence of such establishments tells me worlds about the surrounding residents, namely their values. Tryst cafe and coffee shop was packed at 15:00 on a Saturday, and now matter how long I had to search for a seat, I was pleased that having this halfway house, this meeting place, this space to let your social relationships and private aspirations blossom is not just important, it’s culturally vital. It’s not only having the space to reflect, discuss, and nourish our stomachs and souls alike, but it’s how many people used this space, in Tryst and elsewhere down the block. The magic of coffee shops is here, and it is indeed universal, making the coffee house culture just one more reason why I fit so well in the DC Metro area.

On my plate: kitchen shelves in my new apartment