Marathon Postponed

It was less than a week before my marathon. Tuesday morning, with the race scheduled for Sunday, I got an email announcing it was postponed by two months. Another thing I kept tabs on were protests in Nairobi against a new finance bill. 

The issues being protested were far more important, of course, but this was a really big blow to my training plan. The week before I ran 20 miles and was now tapering. I had felt some knee and muscle pain, and was carefully balancing staying in race shape with avoiding injury.

Now I had to do stretch that out over two months, a timeframe that included a work trip where I wouldn’t be able to run, and the hottest part of the year.

I considered trying again the following year. I thought about maybe using my Kenya reservations as a tourist and simply running a marathon elsewhere. I looked at Washington. South Dakota. But none of that was satisfying.

I decided that the biggest question was “what makes for the better story?” 

I hadn’t been training for months to run the South Dakota marathon. Nairobi was the goal. And as obnoxious as it would be to yo-yo my training and risk injury, the better story clearly was to take the more difficult path.

In the end, I ran in Kenya. If you saw my video you know I did get injured AND I finished the race despite that. I am kind of stubborn about this whole better story philosophy, I guess.

Guyana: Wonderfully Diverse

Nature shows us.
Diversity is a strength.
Lacking diversity is a weakness.

And Guyana is a pretty gorgeous testament to diversity, in a number of ways.

Marathon in Nairobi, pt. 3

The Big Finish…

I think I expected a wave of emotion at the finish line, but to be honest it most mostly a big sigh of ASANTE SANA, WE’RE DONE.

I’ve heard people say that the race itself isn’t the marathon, the training is. All the early starts to the day, running a half marathon before work, figuring out how to keep up with the training plan despite travel and injury, it was a lot!

For that reason, I’m glad I kinda went big for this race.

Sharing your art and signing off the apps

THE CREATIVE’S QUANDRY OF 2025

IT’S 2025 AND I’M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO CREATE AND SHARE MORE OF MY ART WHILE SPENDING LESS TIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

Like a lot of people, apparently, I’m hoping to untangle as much of my life from the world of social media as possible. The reasons aren’t going to be terribly unique or novel.

I read somewhere that the bulk of younger Instagram users would be willing to pay money if it would make the app vanish from existence. That response was even stronger towards TikTok.

Can you imagine hating, for example, a restaurant so much that you would pay for it to go away? It’s no longer enough to go elsewhere, it’s a matter of eliminating its impact on the world you live in.

It hasn’t always been this bad, though. I can’t deny a lot of the really good things that social media has opened up in my life. For the past two decades, I’ve dabbled in a lot of creative endeavors. And social media has been instrumental in how I’ve connected my work with the world at large.

In 2009, it was publishing new poems to Tumblr.

In 2011, it was photography on Flickr and writing on Wordpress.

In 2020, Instagram became the spot where my illustration blew up.

These days, Instagram is still my go-to spot for promoting improv shows and storytelling events.

Having instant access to online platforms for sharing my work helped me get my reps. It allowed me to sharpen my creative skills while having a space to unpack different storylines in my life.

But the good doesn’t outweigh the bad like it used to. This year, I am hopeful to significantly scale back my usage. And that’s going to mean reconfiguring my creative process a bit.

I often get a good burst of creative energy towards the end of the year, and last December was no exception.

I drew a month’s worth of illustrations in about a week. Whenever I sat down to write, the words flowed freely. Making videos felt easier than usual.

There was a lot to make. And the time off work gave me the chance to work on it.

Plus, transitioning from one year to the next makes you look backward and forward at the same time. You get to take a few steps back and see life from a wider lens than you typically do. That sort of big-picture perspective is a great one from a creative standpoint.

So yeah, things were flowing freely.

Even more importantly, making them felt fun. Bringing things in my head to life on paper had some real flow. And at the moment, it actually didn’t seem to matter that much how I would publish, share, distribute, promote, or get this stuff out there. At least for a little bit, what mattered was simply bringing them into existence.

Of course, creative life isn’t always like that. Artists make things to be seen and heard. Sure, a lot of us would bristle at the idea of being attention-seeking, but we do want some people on the receiving end of our work. There’s something about performing for an empty audience that feels a bit pointless.

But more often than not, the process of making art and the process of sharing it have felt like separate spheres.

One gives energy, one takes.

One feels fun, the other like a chore.

And as I post another illustration for my five-digit following, only to see that the algorithm only delivered to a couple dozen of them, the latter feels increasingly pointless.

It wasn’t always like this, though.

I came of age when social media was a brand new puppy, ready to be fed with cryptic emo song lyrics and much more innocent feeling memes.

In my quest to turn down the volume of social media, I’ve been asking myself… how would I promote this stuff if it were 2003?

It takes me back to the time where, as a middle schooler, I was on a school trip to New York and a man on the street handed me his mixtape. DaFear. His CD had four tracks, respectively named Track01, Track02, and so on. My seventh grade self was so amused, probably because the subject matter was a bad pairing with my maturity level at the time. But hey, DaFear. I respect the hustle.

If music were my main gig, I don’t know if I would be using quite that same method as DaFear, but I would be trying to go where the people are and to get in front of them. Open mic nights. Coffee shops. One of my favorite performances was a friend of mine who convinced a bakery in 2009 to let him plug in and play for an evening. He invited so many of us it turned into this cozy gathering of friends.

Does that make his stuff do numbers the way it might’ve via Bandcamp? Probably not. But I do know I still listen to his stuff 15 years later, which is more than I can say for many social media discoveries of the era.

If your goal is to massively blow up as an artist, I don’t know if this is a complete strategy. But if you want an audience and want to have more fun, it’s at least a good start.

If I could pin down an experience that I think offers a good model to the creative world at large, it would have to be my improv theatre.

A few years ago I dropped in as an audience member.

A couple years ago, I started classes, graduated, and even took on some electives.

Over the past few years I’ve joined a few indie teams and made a house team.

These days I perform about one show every week.

And since it’s always about the friends we make along the way, I gotta say, it’s given me a good community of people I see on a regular basis.

So basically, this little indie improv theatre has been a place where I can watch others perform, a place where I can learn and get my reps, a place where I can take the stage, and a place where I can hang with my friends. It’s a dojo, a studio, a stage, and a pub all in one.

Makes for a pretty efficient way to get a lot of the things we’re used to turning to social media for.

Improv likely isn’t the thing I consider my primary art form, though it has climbed up the ranks. But my experience with it has made me wish for spaces that offered that for other areas of my creative life.

A place to write alongside writer friends and share and give feedback.

A place to debut digital videos and watch other people’s.

A place for oral storytelling.

In some cases, these things exist. I know of music studios that are very community oriented. Open mics are routine and they give you a chance to meet others to jam with. The world of rec sports has been pretty good at this for a while.

I’ve seen a lot of recently spilled ink suggesting that the social media era as we’ve known it is over.

That in-the-flesh, offline activity will solidify itself as some sort of status symbol, flexing both one’s material privilege in having the time for it, alongside one’s inner willpower to resist the cheap dopamine hits.

Perhaps! I don’t really like to live in the world of speculation. But I do know that over the past 18 months I’ve been telling my team at work to keep exploring ways to promote our work beyond social media. And that I’ve been putting my phone on grayscale to add some friction between myself and the apps. (It’s a good lifehack. Would recommend.)

While the problems with social media are clear, figuring out replacements for its role in our creative lives remains a bit murky. And even though uploading my illustrations to the gram for six reactions feels like shooting it off into the ether, it still feels like I’ve shot my shot.

But the reality is, it’d likely get more than six reactions if I printed one out and put it up in an auto mechanic’s wait area.

Maybe that’s the sort of out of the box thinking that this next chapter of creative endeavors will call for.

Last month, I got a message from a friend looking to book an improv team to perform… at a restaurant. (In my imagination, it’s a dim sum, and the improv scenes need to accommodate wheeled carts of steamed buns and noodles.)

I think more struggling small businesses might be a good partner for struggling small artists. It just takes the initiative to ask the banh mi shop owner if your artist collective could meet there twice a month. Heck, I saw a busker perform at a barbershop during my last haircut.

Forget bringing back Third Spaces, let’s bend the rules entirely and make Ninth Spaces on top of Fifths.

There’s a lot of art to be made. More stories and songs within ya. And more people who need to see it and more people to create alongside. The world is changing, but that part hasn’t.

DaFear, if you’re reading this, lemme hop on a track.

Bill Pickett

BLACK HISTORY DROP

The original cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black, both cattle and herdsmen are genetically linked to Africa’s Fulani tribe.

Post-Emancipation, one of the most available work opportunities for men was cattle herding and breeding. The term cowboy was a slur, that gradually got reappropriated.

In the early 1900s, Bill Pickett emerged as a rodeo star, being one of the earliest Black movie stars.

How I Fight

When the world feels chaotic and absurdist and a bit like that over-the-top melee scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s helpful to remember that it’s all just a set up for Ke Huy Quan’s monologue: 

“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned how to survive…this is how I fight.”

The disgust and overwhelm… it’s reasonable, but also by design. It’s harder for people to stand up for each other when they’re burned out, and people who benefit from injustice know that. Here are some tips to not get played:

Focus on your area of impact and go deep. It’s so much better than chasing the latest outrage around in circles. For things that feel a little more out of reach, find some orgs already doing work and show them some love.

Spend more time with people. In person. Don’t be isolated. Some nights you’ll feel like you have to push yourself a little bit, but it’s worth it in the end.

Remember that the news will show you a lot of terrible things, but it won’t remind you that somebody got their first kiss this week and feels a thousand feet tall. Or that some kid just discovered The Fugees for the first time. Or that some grandparent is getting to course correct regrets they had with their own kids.

And know that it’s sometimes hard to find foods in the center of the good-for-you and tastes-good venn diagram, but kimchi exists and lives in that space.

February 2025

Tank and the Bangas

In my dad era, I don’t get to go out to see live music too often. That’s made me get a little too precious about the shows I go to, wanting to use these rare occasions to see longtime favorite artists.

But you know what?

There’s something special about going to see an artist whose work you don’t know inside-out. An artist whose vibe you’re familiar with, who you’re confident can put on a show, just one you haven’t spent a ton of time with. Then going to their show and getting treated to a p e r f o r m a n c e.

This was Tank and the Bangas last night. They get the party going.

Knafeh ice cream date

Good taste starts early.

COMMUNITY MURAL

Weekend events: Took the big twin out on a ramen centric field trip and wound up watching the halftime show from a sports fan gear store by the border.

Also worked on a mural.

AWARD WINNING

Probably gonna have to retire from nonprofit marketing now that the perfect fundraiser has already been done.

BEST DATE + BEST DATE CRASHER

Marathon in Nairobi, pt. 2

The hard part of the marathon is the middle, right?

Not long after the halfway point of my marathon, my leg seized up. This was frustrating, because this was the exact injury I trained to avoid. I pretty much did everything I could think of to prevent it, and it struck surprisingly early.

My calf cramped. A cramp that was basically like the fastest, most severe charlie horse I’ve encountered. The calf muscle locked up rock-hard, harder than I’m capable of flexing it. And it hurt bad. Like a rubber band that’s supposed to control the leg movement just snapped.

I had to drop to the road and clutch it, which I’m sure looked alarming to the other runners. One offered to fetch an ambulance, but I knew what this was so I asked her to not. One kind Samaritan stopped, said that this thing happened to him too, and gave it a powerful massage until it started loosening up.

But I still had double-digit miles to go, and I knew I would have to walk a few of them. This totally shifted my approach to the rest of the race.

Improv Update

Be revolutionary. Stop taking yourself too seriously.

Life on stage has been a riot. At the end of the year, I auditioned for a house team at our theatre and made it. Freestyle rap improv continues to be the surprisingly delicious hobby shaking up my mid-30s.

Some chances to see me on stage in the near future:

Metal People: 1/24
Pacific Quiche: 2/7, 2/21, 3/7, 3/21
Optimus Rhyme: 3/21
Freestyle Class Recitals: 1/30, 2/20

Toni Morrison

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

–Toni Morrison

Marching orders, Creative Changemakers. The world is in need of better, more beautiful stories.

Marathon in Nairobi, pt. 1

A common pipeline:

“I hate running”
to
“Okay, I did a half marathon and actually feel good about myself”
to
“Could I do a full marathon?”

I’ve been on that trajectory for the past several years. Last year, I decided, maybe now’s the time?

The thing is, training is pretty time demanding, and that’s not something I have a lot of these days. It’s also physically demanding. I decided to approach this race as if it might be the only marathon I ever run.

So with that being the case, I wanted to run somewhere epic.

So how about…
The country that seems to the best runners all over the world?
The country that holds the world marathon record, and eight of the top ten finishes?
A country where, even if I came in last, I could still feel good about myself knowing I ran with the best?

The Nairobi Marathon

26.2 miles/42km in Nairobi

This is one of the wildest ideas I’ve had come true, one of the most demanding things I’ve put my body through, and something I still can’t believe happened. Finishing a marathon in the home country of the world’s best runners.

I would gladly break the space-time continuum to visit my 14 year old self who hated running, struggling through the mile, to trot up next to him like, “bro, you are not gonna believe what happens in a couple decades…”

dodgerblue

Kendrick feat. Shohei on the dodger blue remix?

At this point I wouldn’t put anything past Ohtani. But since it’s not exactly in my ability to coordinate the two hopping in the studio, I did the next best thing and drew him and Decoy into the gnx carpool.

Since this is the most LA piece I’ve ever done, I put it up in my shop as a canvas and a trading card preorder, with sales going to help wildfire relief through Baby2Baby.

Guatemala, 2022

Kelvin Kiptum

Kelvin Kiptum is the fastest marathoner of all time. He broke the world record in 2023 in Chicago with the time of 2:00:35.

Nobody has ever finished under 2:00:00. I don’t know how, but experts estimated that based on the rates of how people have gotten stronger and faster over time, it might happen in 2070. But if anyone could speed up that timeline, it would’ve been Kiptum. He only debuted in 2022, running a 2:01 in Valenica, and at only 24 years old, he could reasonably break his own record.

Sadly, he was killed in a car accident about this time last year. The Nairobi City Marathon this year was dedicated to his legacy.

2025, what if

My “what’s in” post last year turned out to be scarily accurate, so what if this year we:

▶️ Sleep in (five times)
▶️ Start making chai at home
▶️ Keep the plants alive
▶️ Sell prints of my artwork
▶️ Ignore social media growth
▶️ Delight in how nuanced and complex people are
▶️ Celebrate TEN Years of being married with a grown ups only trip
▶️ Stop using trips as an excuse to skip running and instead run in cool new places
▶️ Live every day like 2025 was an album with no skips

Urgently Slowing it Down in 2025

Showing up to 2025 with pretty much one main goal in mind

2024

Here’s to Finland and Pre-Kindergarten and marathon training and trying not to get sick again and freestyle rapping and Portugal-and-Spain and kaya toast with coffee and ducking branches while riding in a truck bed and being the Wario to my kids’ Mario Bros. and dipping in the Essequibo River and Juniper’s lyrics and so many more things.

Amidst all the highlights, there were also a lot of stretches that tested my endurance. The back-end of the year especially seemed to demand everything out of me. But sometimes all you can do is step back and say, that was a tough one, but I’m proud of how I showed up.

Here’s hoping there’s a few things you can say that about at the end of this year.

Rhys' First Passport

Kid passports are valid for five years, meaning the one I got Rhys as his very first Christmas present is about to be retired. (And replaced, of course!)

But this little booklet has given us some incredible adventures, hasn’t it?

Traveling with kids is different. But a love for other cultures and exploring and a sense of being able to do big things is something I want to pass on to them. And I’m so glad we say yes to a lot of our wild ideas.

That Space You Crave

I have it good. I can’t deny that.

I think of how I get to spend my day. The working hours I spend doing things I love… storytelling, being creative. I get to do this in service of climate vulnerable communities around the world. What a treat. It gives me so many opportunities to meet people and see where they live. How they live.

My home hours I get to spend with the greatest people of earth, three of whom just arrived in the past few years. It’s chaos a lot of the time, but also a delight. It’s the family life I always prayed for.

Even in the margins, the moments of play, I get so much opportunity to do what I love. Improv and illustration and running.

I should be enthusiastically enamored with every single moment, right?

Well, if not totally at that level, I should at least be able to recognize that almost every activity that comprises my day is something that I chose. That at one point I decided, “I would really like to be doing that with my life.”

And I recognize that this is a privilege, one that eludes so many people.

So why do I spend so many days feeling uneasy about not getting everything done on time? Why does it feel like I’m often trying to get a task “just over with” rather than sitting and savoring each one?

Is this what happens when you have too much of a good thing? When you have so many ideas and ambitions you’re trying to serve that you end up crowding out the things that make each one special?

It’s a common “area to work on” I get about my creative work. It actually doesn’t surprise me much that the feedback applies more broadly to my life.

There’s a scene in an episode from Full House that sticks with me quite a bit.

Now, I haven’t actually seen the episode or scene in over twenty years, so my memory is quite fuzzy. But the fact that I think about it somewhat regularly must mean there’s a big of, um, emotional truth that lodged its way into my long term storage.

It’s a day when for whatever reason, Danny Tanner winds up spending the whole day with his girls. They visit a cool aquarium, head out on the town, and do a bunch of cool 1990s San Francisco-y things.

After all that excitement, he’s tucking them in at night… most likely in those beds with the giant pencils for bedposts. But in spite of such an awesome day, one of his kids is sad. (DJ, perhaps? Feels like a DJ kind of move.)

Anyways, he asks her what’s wrong, and she explains that she had a hard time enjoying the day with the knowledge that at some point it had to be over.

This is about as existential as TGIF had ever gotten, but it’s a thought that had the air of familiarity.

I’ve been there.

Knowing that what’s in front of you is the best thing ever, but that it’s not gonna stick around forever. It can’t. You know you should be happier about the fact that it’s unfolding right now! That it’s right there, in front of your face. You can’t be any more within the moment. And yet, the awareness that it’s temporary seems to pull you out of it.

What’s a 1990s sitcom kid supposed to do in a Netflix limited series kind of world?

Recently, I found myself unpacking my bags in Paramaribo, Suriname to a clash of feelings.

I was happy to be there, exploring one of the least visited countries in South America. I was appreciative of how much opportunity I had to travel lately. Seeing new places made me feel more alive.

At least usually.

This time around, however, I was also dead tired. I found myself thinking that I wish the trip could be happening at a different time. After I’d had a moment to decompress from a recent busy season.

That night, I decided to forgo an extra opportunity to explore in order to go real slow, read, and draw in the hotel room. It felt a bit wrong, having gone so far and having made it to such an under-the-radar destination, but spending the first night this way. But deep within I knew that this was the right choice that would make the trip as a whole more enjoyable.

Such a decision, and the feelings that led to it, come with a tinge of guilt.

I’m really fortunate and privileged to be able to do what I do. To have work that allows me to travel and to be creative. To have a family life that is able to accommodate it. To have so many pieces in play that allow me to do what I love. I know that’s not something everybody has, and I know that it’s not something that comes easy.

So to take that gift and squander it on an early night in?

Over the past year, I’ve brushed up several times against the phenomenon that having too many good things in one space often diminishes each one. It’s a trend that repeats in visual art, in gardening, and in how we live our lives.

The space in between is important.

The kids have recently reconfigured their sleeping arrangements.

Everyone’s now at an age where it makes more sense to split the twins and have my boys be roommates. The tuck-in routine has a new rhythm.

I have such a wild relationship with tuck-in time.

On one hand, the hours from 6-9 PM are routinely the most chaotic. It’s usually when the kids tend to have the highest energy and the lowest patience for each other. It’s also when the chores converge. Dinner and dishes and clean up time, and on certain nights, bathtime, trash collection, and lunch packing.

After finally crossing off each item, things finally end with stillness. Storytime. Prayer. Perhaps a random conversation or tender moment with one of the kids. And when they’re drifting off is when I remember different chapters of doing this routine. At one, in a crib. At three, in a toddler bed. At five, with a brother as a new roommate. The stillness and sweetness is a strange aftertaste, post-chaos.

And this has been pretty much every night for the past five years.

And then I spend a good chunk of whatever’s left in the day watching shows, reading, drawing, and hanging with Deanna, but in the back of my mind is how quickly the kids are growing and how amazing they are. I want to make sure I’m savoring the parenting journey, knowing that more experienced parents have all said it goes by too fast at a rate of 100%. At one point, I didn’t even know if a family like this was possible. If it would be in the cards for us. And now, it’s the spitting image of abundance.

A stray meme once told me, “parenthood is largely rushing your kids along, trying to get them to hurry up and go to bed, so you can then whip out your phone and scroll through all the photos you took of them throughout the day.”

Pretty much sums it up.

Right now, the most urgent thing in my life is to remove as much urgency as possible.

How many tasks could be enjoyable, if only they didn’t end with the qualifier “by the end of the day”?

How much more enjoyable would the night time routine be if you didn’t feel like you abandoned a work task mid-flow, just to get these responsibilities taken care of, before jumping back in? What if you actually shut your laptop with the aim of shutting it down? And what if allowed you to better remember that this tuck in time is bonding time? A time to meet the kids in their goofiness and to play?

And what if each time you took on the work tasks, you did so with less urgency and more space? What if opening up all the files you’re working on could feel like a musician hopping into the studio, ready to tap into a flow state and get into a groove?

What if the space in between activities, in between trips, in between adventures was restful and open, allowing you to reflect on those adventures properly? And then whenever your next trip rolls around, it doesn’t feel like an add-on, but a whole distinct entree in and of itself. It’s value is there.

Artistic mastery often looks like understanding the value of space. The expansiveness of the worlds created by Hayao Miyazaki not wanting to rush through an exposition. The way Justin Vernon lingers on every single note until he’s good and ready to move to the next one. The way Min Jin Lee took 30 years to work on Pachinko, letting its story span eight decades, and in doing so creating a watershed epic novel. Even in trying to hang up some of my artwork around the house, I recognize that there’s a point of things being too crammed. It’s a line I frequently step over.

Space is sacred. And one of my top priorities right now is to stop overscheduling. To worry less about getting stuff done.

To live the actual moment.