Vikings, Origami, and New Mexico | Friday Footnotes #1

What are the things that enrich your life?

Friday Footnotes is a weekly newsletter where reflection meets real life.
Each week, I list five things from the past week that enriched my life and invite you to share something that enriched yours.

Think about your life during the week as the main text or plot of a story. I want to invite you to take a minute at the end of the week to annotate it and add footnotes.

For example, maybe you write a "¹" to zoom in on some little memory from the week, adding detail and texture to create a small world. Write a "²" on something you read, to place it into a broader historical context. Write a "³" on something you overheard, letting it go sideways as a digression to brainstorm on later. Write a "⁴" on a piece of advice you got, simply so you remember it. And finally, write a "⁵" on a question that came up, not that you have an answer for now, but so that we can noodle on it in the future.

This is what footnotes are: little acorns scattered over the text that can grow to be mighty oaks later—clarifications, context, digressions, declarations, questions, and more. Footnotes enrich a text. I love footnotes because they're a great metaphor for what I'm trying to do with my creative work.

When I write something, I am trying to add to someone's life in a way that enriches it. Most of my writing is at least partially autobiographical. Still, my hope is that these things I put out are engrossing enough little intellectual side quests that they add texture to people's lives—entertaining, educating, and perhaps even inspiring.

Why now?

I started Friday Footnotes for two reasons.

First, I want to check in with you more often with a lighter touch. I will still work on the books I’ve told you I’m working on, and publish the longer essays I’ve put out before, but in this weekly newsletter, I'll share links, previews, works-in-progress, short thoughts, excerpts, and other things I think you'll enjoy.

Second, I want to be more direct about inviting you to contribute. When I started writing online, I didn't really know how to build a community. As a result, I was bad about creating space for genuine back-and-forth. I want to rectify that by directly inviting you to contribute every week.

Each Friday, I'll invite you to share a footnote of something that happened during your week. What you share is up to you. Maybe it's a conversation, a picture, a link, a quote, something you read, a memory, an idea, something you're proud of, something you're grieving—the possibilities are endless.

The idea is to share a footnote from one thing that enriched your life so this becomes a conversation, then a community. But I’ll go first. Below are five things that enriched my life this week that might inspire you to share.

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Updates

In future issues of Friday Footnotes, I'll include updates here from my big projects, but I want to keep this first issue nice and straightforward, so let’s just jump straight in to the five things.

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Five Things

1 | I’m back in New Mexico.

I’m back in New Mexico for the first time in two years, without my newborn baby, wife, and daughter—which is very hard. I miss them a lot, although we are able to stay in touch through the magic of Facetime and they have a lot of help in town.

This picture of my parents feeding my daughter is from our last trip. It’s one of my favorite pictures, as I think it adequately captured the vibe of the trip. Santa Fe is quaint, beautiful, artsy, a little religious-feeling, and the sopapillas were delicious. This candid picture felt like a benediction, with my parents blessing the sopapilla to give it to my daughter.

This time I am in town to celebrate the life of my uncle, who was raised here but had an illustrious career in computers before moving around. He died in Texas last year and it’s the first time this side of the family has got together in a while. I am sure I will have more to reflect on this trip next week. I am happy to see everyone, and glad to be back in New Mexico, but eager to get back to see my family.

2 | When the weirdest thing that feels right is Origami.

I am always on the lookout for people who exemplify “do the weirdest thing that feels right.” I recently came across two perfect examples and I’m working on an essay about one now: Robert Lang. As a preview of that essay, I wanted to share some good quotes from articles I’ve read and videos I’ve watched of him.

From a 2007 profile of him in the New Yorker:

Lang grew up outside Atlanta. He was given an origami book when he was six by a teacher who had run out of ways to keep him entertained during math class. Lang took to origami immediately. He was fascinated by the infinite possibilities within the finite-seeming—the characters and the creatures that could almost magically come to life from an ordinary square of paper. He worked his way through the designs in one book and then another and another. He had many interests—stamps, coins, plants, bugs, mud—and he was, as his father, Jim Lang, says, “a super-duper math whiz,” hooked on Martin Gardner’s recreational math column in Scientific American. But paper folding engaged him most. He started designing his own origami patterns when he was in his early teens.

Lang went to college at Caltech, where he studied electrical engineering. “Caltech was very hard, very intense,” he told me recently. “So I did more origami. It was a release from the pressure of school. I’d fold things, record the design, and then throw the model away.” He had never met anyone else who did origami, and he didn’t tell people about his pastime.

From a YouTube video called Origami Master: Robert J. Lang:

I discovered origami when I was about six. I received a book that had some instructions for three or four traditional designs in it, and I thought, oh, this is a fun puzzle. Let's try to follow these instructions and make these figures, and eventually, I succeeded, but then I was struck by how beautiful it was that one could create all the different shapes with nothing more than a sheet of paper and one's hands.

I don't think I could've planned the career path that I took. Opportunities arose and I took them when they came along, but I couldn't have guessed that this or that opportunity would lead me to where I am today. I think one of the most important things I could give advice to anyone, whether they're doing origami or any other field, is to follow their curiosity. Some of those things we pursue for curiosity's sake could turn out to have an application down the road, but curiosity itself is reason enough to pursue them.

3 | Nickel Boys is the best movie I’ve seen in a while.

I am lucky enough to get to take some time off for the birth of my son. I’ve been taking advantage of being the one who stays up overnight with him to catch up on the big movies that have come out recently. Many have been great, particularly A Different Man, Sing Sing, and Anora.

But one that feels head and shoulders above the rest is Nickel Boys. It’s an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, written and directed by Ramel Ross. Ross uses a combination of first-person perspective filming spliced with archival footage. The result feels deeply personal, narrative-driven, and ambient all at the same time. I don’t have the filmmaking vocabulary to explain what’s going on, but it feels like Ross is using some parts of his toolbox that are usually used to tell the story to set a scene, and some parts that are usually used to set a scene to tell a story. It feels like Ross has access to an artistic medium nobody else does yet and people will be mimicking his film and influenced by it for years to come.

I like to tell the story of when I read 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and how after reading the final 20 pages, I just stared into space for half an hour, because I was so moved. That is what I did at the end of this movie. I have rewatched movies before. But I have never finished a movie and immediately wanted to restart it before.

I hope to not oversell it, but go in with an open mind, give it about twenty minutes to get used to the different filming style, then put down your phone and let this movie consume you. If we share any aesthetic sensibilities, you will love it.

4 | Can you prepare for “Vikings in the monastery?”

Not everything that enriches my life is positive, whimsical, nostalgic, or enlightening. Often it’s challenging or disturbing. In addition to the artsy prestigious movies I’ve been watching, I recently started streaming some TV shows too. Among them is Vikings, which, so far, is exactly what you’d expect.

The whole show is basically politicking and masculine violence, but one early scene particularly stood out to me. The Vikings are from modern day Scandinavia and have never made contact with England. They sail west and find a monastery. When they land, they make short work of the monastery gate and find all the monks huddled together in a room praying. These two groups of men look at each other for a moment, and then the Vikings unceremoniously walk down and slaughter all the monks save a handful.

This was jarring, because it was two groups of men who each had rigid, internally driven, socially reinforced codes that relied on discipline, order, and a strong sense of how the world should operate. But once the “vikings were in the monastery,” the monks didn’t stand a chance. And it made me wonder about my own code.

The nonstop talk of masculinity in media had arrived at my doorstep when my son was born. When to be strong, when to be savvy, when to be consistent, when to cut corners, when to be kind, when to be cunning—how do I make these decisions and how do I model this behavior? How do I balance doing the right thing as often as possible but ensuring my son survives as long as possible?

I had been worrying not just about how to carry myself but how to transmit these lessons to this little bundle of joy. And I’d be lying if I hadn’t wondered, what if there were a “vikings in the monastery” situation, and someone who simply did not care about my code and internal sense of integrity were hell bent on getting something they wanted and I was mere collateral? What would I do? How would I protect myself?

Once I realized the question I was asking myself, it dawned on me that this was basically the question at the heart of organizing groups of people. Utilitarianism, the categorical imperative, the veil of ignorance, the social contract etc. But it showed up for me in this historical drama. It inspired me to read a little political philosophy. For now, I am just going to keep trying to exercise serenity, courage, and wisdom as the situation calls. But as I am working with bigger groups of people and more people begin to depend on me, it is perhaps not just paranoia to begin planning for what to do if the Vikings ever make it to the monastery.

5 | What am I even talking about?

I was watching a great interview with Marilynne Robinson and wanted to share a quote from it that really resonated with me.

"I think anyone who writes realizes that there's a vast difference between what you find yourself capable of saying and the impulse behind it that remains inaccessible even with great effort. We are not very successful at articulating what is deepest in us."

-Marilynne Robinson

Your Turn. Since last Friday, what's one thing that has enriched your life?

Share in the comments below or email me directly. If you have a link or picture to share, feel free to restack this on Substack Notes.

I'm looking forward to reading what enriched your week.

Until next Friday, Charlie