jayroop

(re)discover + (re)capture + (re)live

it’s the mantra i’ve been repeating for the last half hour of my life.

last fall i applied for a scholarship that would take me to korea for an entire year’s worth of research, study, and experimentation with hanguel typography — korean typography — while providing me with time to explore a country that is both familiar and very, very foreign. in preparation, i enrolled in korean classes and have been studying (with some degree of success) for the past 6 months. i prepared my portfolio, wrote my proposal, got an amazing and inspiring affiliate, and in january found out that it wasn’t meant to be.

now let’s pause for a second. from past experience, i know that things don’t go as planned. in fact, that is for me the rule and not the exception. so that means that i always need a plan b. and a plan c. and in some circumstances a plan d. but with all these variations in plans, it also means that there is a large amount of room for misguided directions and tangents; the equivalent of flailing about a barnyard hoping to find a needle in a haystack. i’ve found (or am finding) that taking the time to really understand the ‘why’ part makes it much easier to come up with those subsequent plans.

that being said, my reasoning for going to korea was both to find inspiration in korean culture (specifically typography + design) and spend some time in the country where i was born; both items of fair game. for the sake of clarity, let’s define the priorities as follows:

 

1) travel to another country to be inspired and explore culture through design

 

2) go back to the source of my roots, find comfort in awkward familiarity, live

taking these requisites into account i came up with this:

 

plan b: attend graduate school in sweden (the academic + professional development approach)

 

plan c: look for another job in the land of stripes (the conservative, yet non-complacent approach)

 

plan d: hold tight and stay put (the logical approach)

see, the problem is that after plan b, things get way off track and start becoming stop gaps. they don’t have a thing to do with the catalysts for this change of direction, and therein is the problem.

so now let’s come back to the present. plan a (going to korea for a year) hasn’t panned out, so it’s time to move full steam ahead with plan b (studying in sweden). the program is great (business + design), and i love sweden. the problems are that they are currently not teaching the program in english, and i don’t speak swedish. i don’t know, this might deter some people but i’m still going to apply. it’s a school whose reputation with me has grown over the year’s as i’ve seen what my friends who attended the school are doing and whose student work is generally very solid. and then there is the real problem, i still want to go to korea.

here’s how it came about. over the past few weeks i’ve noticed that my interest in korean class has started to wane. i’m not as excited, i don’t do my homework very well (although i’m still doing okay in class) and it has become hard to focus on it knowing that i may not be putting it to use anytime soon. this is disappointing to me because i have put time, money, effort and even a little bit of dreaming of the future into the process of learning korean. it also signals to me that i’ve been losing the passion i had for making that trip a reality and this has been the real turning point.

i’ve realized that because i’ve stuck to protocol in moving from plan a to plan b, i’ve inadvertently backed down from my original goals. in fact, the assessment of my reasons for traveling were made just this evening, not months ago when i made the plan. i’ll still follow through on plan b, and maybe this feeling will pass, but i can’t help but think that what i needed was not plan a, plan b, plan c, plan d, but plan 1a, plan 1b, plan 1c, plan 1d, i.e., a variety of ways to achieve the same goal.

after dwelling on this idea for the past week or two, tonight has been a mini-milestone along what will be a long, long journey. i’ve realized that it’s not a failure for plans to fall through, but it is a disservice to yourself when you let your dreams creep away in a clouded moment of panic. with a mind that is constantly whizzing and whirring away, i need to remind myself that i know what + why i want to do, and now is the time to find out how to do it.

and so, here is to the future and keeping dreams intact. let’s go.

okay, i admit it. i am one of those hapless fools who starts a blog with good intentions, only to neglect it and let it sit by the wayside. my desire for this blog was to record my thoughts during a period of my life where things were changing fast. i moved clear across the entire country, picked up a job, made some friends and fell for a girl.

a girl? yes, a girl. which if i’m honest, is a pretty damn good excuse for having fallen off the train. so, in what i hope and pray will be a short series of posts, i will attempt to stitch together pieces of the past; pinching, squeezing and otherwise desperately trying to pull out some worthwhile details of my otherwise quotidian life.

My last post ended with the declaration that I would get out and about and start doing things.

I’m proud to report back six weeks later that I have done just that in the name of friends, fun and productivity (imagine that!). I have not only moved a mere 2 blocks away from work (thereby reducing my commute from 1.5hr to 5 min), but spent a couple of great weekends with friends from the far coast and the rest of the time plugging away at my own personal work.

I’ve also managed to spend a good amount of time outside of the confines of the city and enjoyed experiencing The California Suburb—much like any other suburb, but with better weather with the addition of some “extra thing” that keeps it from feeling like the mundane and quotidian neighborhoods that I grew up in on the East Coast.

This upcoming weekend will be spent in the great outdoors, under the blue blue sky of Lassen Volcanic National Park and I hope to keep up the fun with a flurry of events of the next couple months.

It is with some regret that I must confess that I have no great (or even not so great) thoughts on life at this point.

If there were anything I could say along those lines, it would be that it is very rare that we come across people that we create strong bonds with and life has shown me thus far that the saying Few and Far Between is a true statement in regards to finding friends and companions.

It’s always nice to make friends.

sometime this morning while walking through a cloud (i could tell it was a cloud because when i pulled out my phone, it was instantly sprinkled with water and when i stopped staring at the ground in front of me as i walked, i saw that my glasses were also misted over)...anyways, so i realized that recently, i have made a point to be in the point of realizing things. this is great and all, and i have come to some good conclusions and thought very pointedly about a whole list of things that have been on my mind, but i’ve not really given myself the chance to stop “realizing” and start living.

so, with that being taken note of, i am off to what will hopefully be a wonderful weekend with friends from east coast, west coast and no-coast of pure living.

My mind is spinning in circles. With what rationale do people make these decisions?