Maximize! All! The! Pleasure!
Has 'someday' come and gone?
A week before my last day at my corporate job in 2021, I was riding high on the prospect of one last all-expenses-paid company trip. I was to visit Scotland with a tight team — photographer, executive producer, a few film crew folks — to art direct video clips and b-roll to help announce a new product launch. Bucolic bliss? The CEO may show up to a campfire (we’d film that). I may see a few cute and fluffy highland cows (we may or may not film that). It was a Monday. We were flying out on Wednesday. I was Microsoft Teams messaging the producer with my passport flipped open and turned sideways in front of me to finalize travel details.
“What’s the expiration date?” I glanced down, scanning strings of numbers, avoiding making eye contact with the pixelated mini-me staring back with glossy paper eyes.
My fingers keyed, May 21, 2021. My pinky tapped ‘return’. Sent.
A spectre of familiarity crab-crawled down my back. May twenty-first, twenty twenty one was, gulp, today.
My passport seemed to grow flatter in front of me. Even my Macbook deflated. There was no way I was making the trip. Every speckle of dust on my keyboard shrunk in size as the realization that Scotland would remain far, far away and I would remain right-smack-dab here morphed into a dull, sunken feeling that I felt deepen from my nose to my toes.
I nodded dumbly. I may have even managed a dry cackle.
In the years since that cosmic hiccup, I’ve archived that story under the chapter of “everything happens for a reason”. But sitting just below my comfort-blanket belief that “everything happens for a reason” lies a more nihilistic belief layer. The Scotland trip actually didn’t happen because the universe is blank, unfeeling, and chaotically complex. Dates, schedules, and the pearl-strand of present moments don’t hold any meaning. Time is elastic. It’s ruthless and has its own sense of humor. And now with our frenetic days as new parents, the sun and the moon seem to tumble ever faster into a wheel of light: Yet another spinning plate for me to balance and eventually drop. The Scotland trip is a reminder that I cannot take time for granted.
I’m 35 years old this year and I just realized that I may be harboring “someday” projects that will seriously never happen if I don’t make concrete plans to make them happen now.
So, wielding Substack as my accountability wand once more, here are some “someday” projects that are bumping up to the front of the queue so that I can start them and either let them fizzle out — they were devised by a younger, different me, and have expired, so I can simply let them go — or they’ll become real and the regret monster can take a hike.
It feels vulnerable to admit some of these things! But here they are:
Make a (Riso) magazine. Make it non sequitur. Make it weird. Make it in the spirit of Wet, Lucky Peach, Dazed, The Whole Earth Catalog, The Smudge, etc. But with what focus? To be determined.
Illustrate a full tarot deck. If I were to illustrate a card a week, this should take me around two years. In reality it will take me more. My favorite tarot deck is by Uusi. I’m also eagerly awaiting this Quilted Tarot Cards with Sarah Eichhorn & Kayle Kabowski class via the Humble Oak school on August 9th. Join me!
Design nail polish. That’s in the works — more on that in the next few years.
Design a line of leather bags. If you know of a quality leather manufacturer who does custom work like this, especially one in the United States, let me know.
Make an infinity more personal zines including: recipes, sweeping graves in HK, sacred mind palace, car designs (from interiors to how they would smell, sound, and feel), what the world would look like if I designed the universe (e.g. if Diana designed the universe, all airplanes in the sky would look like flower petals), a treatise on material longing, having a biracial child, bats, sunchokes getting stronger whenever semi-trucks drive over them, books to read, my own fun-eral, how Ben and I met, and of course… motorcycles. This to-do is my true body of work. I want to be known for my images. I want them to be personal. And I want to be proud of them.
Make some kind of archive of my family photos. I haven’t figured out what or how, but I know this is important and I should prioritize it. Ben just invested in an 11”x17” bed scanner. There goes my last excuse.
What are your ‘someday’ projects that you’re ready to dust off from the shelf?
Has ‘someday’ already come and went? What is your threshold? How do you release the guilt?
How do you audit your future projects?
What keeps you from taking the first action step?
Future (Substack) Posts
There’s a back log of posts I want to write about and I’ll also note them here for safekeeping:
Riso Basics Blueprint: Our workshop has been running for 2-3 years now and is pretty dialed-in. I want to document the curriculum and the materials needed, so that anyone can replicate or riff off of it. We just held our first Riso Basics class at Cactus Club and it was a success in our book. I want to include thoughts about how aspects of space is conducive to creativity, group dynamics, and learning in this post.
Seattle Art Book Fair ‘25 / Our best fair yet?
How do you like working for yourself? An old high school friend texted me this months ago and I cannot stop thinking about how I’d like to answer him.
A Room of One’s Ownsome: The importance of crafting a personal, sacred space for yourself. Is it physical? Where is it? What does it hold/yield?
Hong Kong: Any topic. I want to reveal more about a formative part of my life and heritage that I keep mostly quiet about because it “isn’t relevant” to my conversations and day-to-day in the U.S.
Baby Gear. What we liked and actually used. A perspective at 1 year.
Next Riso Basics
Final Scene
Above: Real river rocks near Kalispell, MT. And the same image separated in Spectrolite then printed in Scarlet, Light Teal, and Yellow on white paper. Shop the card here.
Grunge & softness,
Diana