Teapot
by Anton Zuiker on February 23, 2016
Eleven years ago, my precious little clay teapot was broken. I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement ever since.
Tonight, something inspired me to make a pot of Lupicia White Peony Fujian tea, and then search again. And, a-ha, I found the distinctive, simple teapot online, first here and then everywhere, and I learned that I should have been looking for the traditional xi shi design. I’ll be ordering a new teapot soon, and will first brew Keemun Mao Feng Imperial, which I get from Upton Tea Imports.
What could that burst of inspiration have been?
I’d just come downstairs after putting Oliver to bed, reading him another chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and getting a huge hug from him. Oliver is in kindergarten now, and learning to speak Mandarin as part of the dual-language program offered by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.
Write short, talk more
by Anton Zuiker on February 22, 2016
I thought I’d come back to blogging in a slow and deliberate way, writing unhurried essays that would reflect my contemplative observation, and precise editing. I thought that this slow blogging would be good for me, and safe, and not a distraction from my focus on health, family, job.
Writing is hard work. Any good book about writing will tell you that right up front.
I may tell myself that I’m a writer, dammit, a natural-born blogger, but I’m not writing the way I want to, or when, or enough. Truthfully, I’ve been scared to write. Hesitant to get out of my own head.
“You don’t like to talk,” Erin said to me one night. We were discussing friendships and communities, and trying to figure out how I might make more time for friends, and make that time more satisfying for them. I’m a great listener, and ask good, conversation-prompting questions, but I don’t open up enough.
Back in our Blogging101 days, when we were teaching people how to blog, we encouraged regularity in writing. Reading the Without Bullshit blog, where Josh Bernoff writes most days, I’ve been reminded by how short, regular blog posts can be insightful, entertaining, informative and crafted well. And, it helps that Bernoff is blogging to help others write well — without jargon and weasel words and, well, bullshit. “Good writing is clear, brief, and not boring,” he says.
As I trained for the Austin Marathon (and next month’s American Tobacco Trail Marathon), I ran often, I kept my strides short, and I talked to myself, about writing and talking more. I talked myself into a new blogging strategy, one more similar to my running routine: write often, write short, write conversationally.
Running in Austin
by Anton Zuiker on February 13, 2016
The Thinkery is a children's museum in Austin, Texas.
Race day is tomorrow, the 25th annual Austin Marathon, 7 a.m. start time for the 26.2-mile race through the streets of the Texas capital, forecast is 55 degrees Fahrenheit, my bib number 4414. I’m ready.
Yesterday, I met Troy Livingston at a vegan-taco food truck to hear about his new job as CEO of The Thinkery, Austin’s children’s museum. We drove over for a tour of the colorful museum, pulsating from the energy of many families. The night before, the museum had hosted an adults-only event featuring the Science of Sex and how vibrating toys work. I bought a hat.
Today, my brothers Nick and Matt walked with me to Caffe Medici, then took me to the student store at the University of Texas. I bought another hat.
The river around me
by Anton Zuiker on November 13, 2015
My blogging and social media sabbatical in 2014 and 2015 gave me time, energy and mental space to train for a marathon. It also helped me focus on my work at Duke University, where I’m communications director for the Department of Medicine.
Our main project over the last few years has been to update the department’s Web presence, as part of a collaboration with our communications colleagues in the School of Medicine dean’s office to design a new framework for web development. In May 2015, we did away with 18 separate sites (for our 12 divisions and training programs and more) and launched a new integrated website for the Department of Medicine. See it at medicine.duke.edu.
That’s the work that I was focused on.
At the start of my sabbatical, I’d curtailed my online surfing, but eventually I started to revisit a few of my favorite sites around the Web. I began to read Dave Winer again, and I caught on that he was developing a new way to create a river of news.
I’ve long wanted a better way to monitor more of the news flowing through Duke University. My colleagues on the Duke Today team work hard to curate important and interesting news, and I check that site a few times a day. And even though I follow the park ranger philosophy, walking all over campus to look and listen, I know there’s a lot I’m missing. Especially in the School of Medicine, where more and more departments have added communicators, updated their websites and created blogs. I needed a comprehensive, but efficient, way to see what other announcements, funding opportunities and scientific presentations might be relevant to the faculty and trainees in my department.
So, I read through all of Dave’s River4 posts and updates and tutorials, and watched his demo videos, and I set about to create the Duke River of News.
In October, when we learned that Duke Biochemistry professor Paul Modrich had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, in my department, won the same award in 2012) the Duke River was a perfect reflection of the stellar science, wide-ranging scholarship, competitive athletics and detailed learning in all corners of Duke’s campus and its global outposts.
It feels good to stand in the middle of this river. I feel lucky to work at Duke.
Every university should have just such a river.
Colors along the road
by Anton Zuiker on November 12, 2015
Roadside goldenrod
The late-summer yellows of goldenrod and swamp sunflower and whorled tickseed have faded.
Slanting sun warms the rusted leaves. Winter is coming.
In time, dogwood trees will burst again along the road.
Looking down on Cleveland
by Anton Zuiker on November 11, 2015
Cleveland is often the butt of jokes, and sitting at a window seat inside a hip coffeeshop called Pour Cleveland, looking out onto the grimy downtown sidewalk, you wonder if perhaps that’s deserved.
But finish your very good cappuccino and walk East on Euclid Avenue, to the historic bank building newly repurposed for an upscale urban grocery store. Inside Heinen’s, the half-stripped tiled floor between the gourmet aisles makes no attempt to mask the city’s age. Find your lunch, take a seat in the echoing cafe, and watch Clevelanders and tourists alike stream in. An elderly nun, in white cassock and black headscarf, shuffles gingerly into the space, pauses, looks heavenly to take in the beautiful rotunda. ‘Wow,’ you see her say. You look up again, smile, too.
Cleveland Trust Rotunda (June 2015)
A bus takes you down Euclid to University Circle and the new cube that is the home of the Museum of Contemporary Art. You hope to say hi to the director, who once cooked dinner for you and one of the city’s preeminent art collectors, but she’s just started her sabbatical (you’re about to end yours). Climbing the steps to the gallery, you notice ‘Keep your promises’ nailed onto the wall. You often jot that same phrase on the opening page of your pocket notebooks. You’re back in Cleveland today because you promised yourself you’d explore the city by foot.
At night, on the city’s near west side, on a block of Cleveland that was recently rough and forlorn, you walk into bustling Platform Beer Company. A friend is waiting, with a brew sampler and stories of more development on the books. He tells you to look down to the narrow wood slats that remain from when this building was a bowling alley. That friend, ever the booster for his city, also points you to a coffeeshop that’s hub of yet another revitalizing slice of Cleveland, this one dubbed Hingetown. Tomorrow, you’ll step inside the former fire station there and notice an even older wood floor, and the fireman’s pole still poking through the ceiling.
Before you go home, down south, you drive over the crappiest winter-violated streets you can imagine, but stop at the smooth pavement of a new road overlooking the Cuyahoga River, not far from where it once burned, and where now the Towpath Trail is slowly snaking north toward Lake Erie. Skipping with your children along one section of the trail, finished and fabulously lined with black-eyed susans and other wildflowers, you glance up through the hulking footings of a bridge to see downtown’s skyscrapers, awaiting the national attention of a political convention next year.
If you must, look down on Cleveland. Then look up, and look about. Get around, to the coffee shops and breweries, and parks and groceries. See the city for what it is—rich in history, gritty in its perseverance, and pulsing with promise.
Downtown Cleveland from beneath the Hope Memorial Bridge
Get out
by Anton Zuiker on November 10, 2015
The Zuiker family loves the outdoors.
For spring break two years running, Erin and I took the kids to St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Without laptops or cell phones for the week, we spent the hot days relaxing at the beach under the shade of sea grape trees. I floated with my children in the clear Caribbean Sea, dived to retrieve a sand dollar for each of them, and felt wealthy beyond measure as I surfaced to their smiles.
At night, with only window screens separating me from the world outside, the evening air cooled across my skin, and I stirred in my sleep when I recognized a gecko’s chirp different from the chorus that had been singing for hours.
Sprat Hall, by Malia Zuiker
Walk around
Grandpa Sisco, my mother’s father, rose most mornings at 4 a.m. to walk the streets of DeKalb, Illinois. I take my stroll midday at Duke University, where I work. I walk through the medical center, onto campus and past the chapel, into the woods and back to my cubicle in the hospital. This university is a world of its own, with a noble desire to know the wider universe, and when I sit back down to my desk I feel damn lucky to work here.
On an August vacation with family and friends to far southwest Texas, I hiked across ranchland and down blazing-hot trails in Big Bend National Park, mesmerized by the enormous vistas. We ambled into Marfa for lunch, and while the kids placed pennies on railroad tracks, I ordered pork banh mi from the Food Shark food truck.
Other days, I walked the streets of Chicago, Atlanta, Charleston, Kansas City and Boston. Walking in Cleveland’s Rocky River Valley, I glimpsed an owl—totem of Grandpa Zuiker—sitting in the beech tree above me.