I saw some Republicans yesterday.

In fact, I saw hundreds, maybe millions.  I was in the middle of an improv everywhere stunt, except the Republican canvassers didn’t sing show tunes, or freeze in place for five minutes.   They were real, and they all wore navy blue polo shirts and planted themselves at regular intervals down the central corridor of the Holland farmers market.

For a God time call...

I knew that this was a super-conservative area of the country, but as I walk around town, I find it hard to believe that the majority of people around me can tolerate the extra ten bars of volume of Fox News. I want to reach out and touch them and ask them to tell me why, but I think they’re telling me already.  I found a flyer on the ground next to my car today. Without my glasses I live in my own happy haze, and I saw it, thought “Great! Someone wants to have a good time! Me too!”  Then I picked it up.

I’ve never lived somewhere where religion defines the community.  For instance, last night I went to a bar to watch Michigan football with a couple folks I’ve met.  I sinned right off the bat by asking if it was University of or State, but was allowed to repent and followed along with the game, cheering when other people clapped, slapping my hands and yelling out a: “here we go” approximately every 7 minutes to keep up appearances.

I’m waiting for the iPhone app: how to be a sports fan when you already feel awkward for being the new person.  Think of it – tips about match-ups, key games, things to shout at bars.  I’m not thinking the boring statistics trivia either.  None of the: “this is the fourth highest ratio of players to fans at a game in the in the Midwest in the last 11 years.”  I can listen to a semi-circle of large men wearing earmuff headsets for no apparent reason if I need data.  I’m talking good, juicy information.  Tidbits that are entirely irrelevant to the game that I can weave into sentences with strangers.  “I’m so glad Jones doesn’t like tuna. I don’t like tuna either.  Go TEAM!”

The boys in blue at the farmers market were collecting signatures for congressman Pete Hoekstra’s (R-Michigan, headquarters 25 yards from my door) bid for governor.  Now, how many of you walk faster and prepare excuses and faux-polite ‘no thank yous’ in advance of seeing any sort of person with a clip board that might ask you to sign a petition of any sort?  These people are a nuisance, right? Wrong in Michigan.  People were lined up five deep to scribble on these clipboards.  It was the most non-presidential election excitement I have ever seen. I wanted to sign just so I could be part of something and yell, “Go TEAM!”

Too bad my teams weren’t playing.  I don’t mix my politics and religion, but I have no problem mixing design with business, or art with geology.  Why is this? As designers we know the power of leveraging one discipline with another.  A large portion of American conservatives have figured out the same.  Wow!  What are the qualities of a successful pairing of disciplines / disciples?  What two groups, when joined, could really make a difference in the world, tear it down, or make us laugh?

So yes, now I live amongst the people that voted for Bush, but they’ve inspired me in a way I didn’t see possible.

My favorite Vans have a hole.

When I moved to Santa Cruz, CA in 2002 I made sure that everyone knew I was from Massachusetts.  I arrived on time, brought a bunch of sweaters and khaki pants, honked at pedestrians, and just in case anyone was left wondering, I dressed as a Masshole for Halloween.  A what? If you have to ask, you’ll never know.  That’s both the embedded Masshole in me talking, as well as the quote that was on the theme of my high school yearbook in 1994.  I became very self-aware in 1994.  My thick corduroy pants and chain wallet without the wallet complemented Counting Crows and the one-song gig of my band, Purple Karma.  It’s hard to be in a band if your musical contribution is via Suzuki violin because there are no rock songs that merge with Minuet in D.

My So-Called Life forever changed the complexity of television in 1994 and I thought that if I knew Clare Danes we might be friends, just as now I think that if I knew Diablo Cody, we would also be friends.  I doubt I’d ever get along with Sarah Jessica Parker, even though the characters she plays love shoes as much as I do, though by shoes I mean sneakers and she means Manolo Blahniks.

By my fourth year in Santa Cruz I had begun to arrive when I arrived, wear hoodies, ride a cruiser, and and have no problem participating in everyday impromptu parades.  Vans were my sneakers of choice.  Simple, blank canvases covered with a range of art, Vans should be the reference point for every usability engineer.  Consistent and predictable but with enough variety and edge so that you never know anyone that has the same pair that you have.  My Massachusetts friends accused me of being a Californian but I still honked at pedestrians.

wink wink - things are getting risque in downtown Holland

It’s 2009 now and I am afraid of Michigan. I don’t know what I’m going to look like in a month.  Two months.  If the people of downtown Holland are any measure, in a year I’ll look like a retiree.  Is there a raging subculture I have yet to find? A street of edgy stores?  What do Republicans wear to bed?

My teal Vans with white flowers have a hole, and somehow I transmitted floor polish to the inner soles, leaving me walking tentatively on slippery pucks as I people watch and try to guess an individuals political affiliation based on his or her outfit.  I love guessing the personal history of strangers.  My sister and I play this game to extremes and we get frustrated when other people refuse to show the same enthusiasm or prowess for pigeon holing.

I have a whole new crop of strangers to look at these days and this candy store is always open.  I know I’ll get used to this town and make it work just like you get used to having a small rock in your shoe and find a way to shake it into a tolerable place without having to remove your shoe.

Once, when I was a freshman in college, I boiled my hairbrush in bleach in a microwave oven.

In 1997 we didn’t have a swine flu pandemic.  We had lice.  The urban legend around patient zero had something to do with good deeds like volunteering at an elementary school, where the crawling dandruff latched on, laid eggs, and proceeded to mate and reproduce at rates never before seen outside of the incestuous family of gerbils that I had in the fourth grade.  The gerbils had babies while we were on vacation, and then the babies had babies, and then one of the adults died and the others decided he was food, and then we came home from vacation. Yes, it’s disgusting, but my dad had a solution. He drove me and the 10 gallon fish tank teeming with rodents to a small pond right next to a Denny’s and made me dump them out on the shore.  He justified this by saying that the owls would be happy and make more owl pellets, a unit of fourth grade I had completed only weeks before.  The flesh-eating cycle of life made sense at that moment, and I thought I might get a ‘Moons Over My Hammy’ out of the trip so I dumped the fuzzy nuggets and vowed to never let the cycle of life get the best of me again.

When the lice epidemic hit, I was ready.  At first word I washed anything that had fabric on it with double the amount of Tide, a product that is so intertwined with my memories of childhood that I will never even admire the packaging of another brand, and ceased to let friends enter my aseptic chamber.  I began dipping things that would make too much noise in the washing machine into a bowl of bleach so they could disintegrate instead, but my hairbrush received the royal boil treatment.

Did I mention that I never had lice?  This was simply my preventative treatment.

The stuffed version of H1N1 - boil before cuddling.

So, you can imagine my concern when I learned that the swine flu is causing college campuses, many of them that open today, to quarantine students.  My tiny Michigan town is home to a college, Hope College.  I walked downtown after work today and these Hope students are simply milling about, talking, touching…is that coughing I hear?  I squirm internally at the thought of the body-hopping H1N1s (“H1 to N1.” “You have sunk my battleship.”) feasting on freshman.

I don’t think enough is being done to design for germs.  Jeff Young has made some great face masks, and a few companies have created stuffed versions of the germs.  But will passing out fuzzy pink owl pellets to my local freshman help prevent disease?

These kids don’t need Hope, they need hot bleach water.

If a comedy is shown in a movie theater and nobody is there to see it, is it still funny?

Always lead with your chest.

I went to the Holland Star Theater today to see Extract.  In the previous sentence, ‘went’ is a strong word. ‘Went’ implies that I casually popped over to catch a flick. In fact, first I allowed Google Street View to show me around the school of strip malls where the theater supposedly sits but as much as I moved the strangely warped flying stick figure through the landscape I didn’t see it.  I drove to the location anyway because, heck, this is how they did it in the good old days before technology was invented and again, I didn’t see it.  I explored the depths of strip malls, drove diagonally across empty parking spaces in a huge lot (the only appeal of parking lots, but a great one) and almost gave up when I turned one last corner to see the Star Theater.

The lobby was quiet and I purchased my ticket with a credit card but without having to sign the receipt that’s made of movie ticket.  I don’t understand why some receipts are made of movie ticket and not normal receipt paper.  The experience of signing that tiny stub and then passing it back to the teenager only to have them pass back the actual ticket plus the take home receipt, also made of ticket that you have to check three times to figure out which one is the ticket and which is the receipt – you know that experience? I’ve never taken to it.

The popcorn was pre-arranged.  I like when my popcorn bag is filled to overflowing with the giant scoop out of the huge window-vat of popcorn.  I’m not so sure about the same window containing orderly, pre-bagged corn. I felt like I was selecting a pastry – “I’ll have that one over there, third from the end on the right…my right, your left.” It was eerie to have the popcorn waiting under the counter.  By nature popcorn is haphazard, wild, messy, and spontaneous. Why fight it?

I took my red bag and went into the theater.  Besides me, there was only one couple in attendance, and they had selected the perfect seats.  I commend them on their shutout.  Any seat I could have selected was too far to the left, right, forward, back, or awkwardly near them.  I settled in, pulled up my hood because that seat fabric has most certainly never been washed, and slumped down for the marathon of vampire movie previews that precede every film this summer.  Can someone tell me why every new movie involves pasty vampires?

I thought about laughing at one point during the actual movie.  Not laughing as a result of the movie, sadly, but I thought about laughing in general because the couple in the perfect seats chuckled once.  What makes a movie funny? Is it possible to laugh at a movie when the theater is empty?  How often do you laugh alone?  I left the theater wondering if the recession was to blame for the empty theater, and everything stayed unfunny.

My favorite part of the experience was the empty, patterned bathroom.  I didn’t adjust these doors.  It must have been the same girl that does the popcorn.

I played golf by myself today.  I had nobody to mumble self-conscious excuses towards after botched shots.  I shot par on the first hole. Nobody saw it. I shot a 9 on the second hole. Nobody saw it.  I shot birdie on the third hole. Birdie! Nobody saw it.  I continued on the forth and fifth holes in what was shaping up to be one of the best games I’ve ever played.  My confidence oozed like a soggy green and I began to think that I was good enough to make eye contact with other golfers, but there was nobody in front or behind me.  In the middle of the fairway of hole six, the ranger drove up to tell me that if I wanted to play the blue course (aka the real course) I could hop in with him and he’d drive me to the tee. Oozing slows as I realize that both my greatest and crappiest shots have been played on the easy course.

Ahh golf.  What a tease! I started playing three years ago because Stanford gave me PE credits and I figured I could get into visors.   I didn’t know I was stepping on to an emotional roller coaster fit for Wally World.  Now here I am, teeing off alone in Michigan.  I walked the course, because I like the pace of the game that way.  It gives me ample time to worry about my next shot.

Michelle Wie. You see her here. But she's no bigger than a speck if she's 300 yards in front of you.

We all know of golf legends and lore, or at least we realize that these exist and dramatically nod along when someone else mentions them.  The word authentic comes to mind when we silence ourselves for the putts of others.  Did I say ‘authentic’ or ‘old man?’ Maybe that’s not fair.  After all, last spring I played a round at Stanford with Joe Mellin of TicTasks and we were put with a random third guy whose obsession with Michelle Wie, playing with her parents right in front of us, was entertaining enough to entertain with the same exaggerated head nods.

Either way, the sport itself carries a brand of purity, but the equipment is modern and commercial.  Even women’s golf clothing is finally being designed so that we can carry around an extra ball in our pocket without looking like we have … a ball in our pocket.  Designer Lauren Milroy put the ball pocket lower on the pant leg where it’s no longer obscene.  Putt putt (mini golf in case my parents were the only ones that said putt putt) is the only offshoot golf experience.  Are there any other innovations on the game itself?

Speed golf? Disco golf? Full contact golf? Winter golf? Bubba out the list for me.  What’s the next great leap in golf?