Early-morning sun illuminates unpacked boxes in the living room of your new apartment. On your own for the first time.

The white walls of the waiting room where you fidget and pace for the interminable hours a beloved friend or relative is in surgery.

Your grandfather’s funeral.

Your daughter’s first birthday.

A promotion achieved after a decade of tireless commitment.

What’s yours? Is it now? Is it imminent?

The noise of the crowd calling for the end of thirty years of unjust dictatorship. A hoarse voice from days of chanting, sore feet from days of marching. A hunger in the belly that food cannot sate. A people’s revolution.

For the people of Egypt, the people camping in the streets of Cairo, of Suez, of Alexandria. For the people who have fought and died for what they believe in since January 25th. This is your convergent moment. Never give up. Never surrender. Your struggle has touched the heart of the world.

If anything the ground is giving way to the centuries of history that saturate the buildings and streets above it. Yet it’s sad to see such a marvel, once ‘the liquid frontier between the east and the west’ transformed into a tourist attraction. Although it’s probably been that way since long before my time, each year more citizens are forced to relocate to affordable suburbs away from their beloved canals and bridges. Tourists we come and spend and drive up prices, we leave trash and take away photographs and silly souvenirs, but we don’t keep the city standing; the citizens do and they’re the ones tourism forces out. After a while we’re bored and we leave and the citizens that are left go about their business. They work on renovations funded in part by our lavish pleasure-spending and do their best to keep their city standing, flooded or dry, infested by tourists or not. A simple task to master the fickle tides! The true engineering fete of persistence for Venice would be not to abandon the city to the flood of tourists, either.

It made me think of Gever Tulley’s talk about Tinkering School, and perhaps I should let him know that I’ve found the 51st dangerous thing you should let your children do (Tulley’s 5o Dangerous Things here). Sure, the kid might throw the iPhone across the room and break the screen, but that’s a chance you ought to take. You should have seen this girl! It’s like she knew intuitively how to use it, like the phone was an extension of her dextrous, chubby little fingers.

The next generation’s technology is going to make ours seem like it was built by a clever bunch of chimps.

But I don’t mind promoting them. They make some of the best outdoor gear on the market.

The absence of human presence in the photos sharpens the contrast. They stand alone, emptied of occupants and of their original meaning. They stand only for the observer, as a reminder of what was lost.

Whether they were abandoned or neglected so long that abandonment was the only option left, the end result is the same: Mother Nature now rules these buildings.

The growth that inhabits a space once used by people proves that the houses are more than just monuments to decay. They have taken on a new meaning as the birth of life in the midst of a city in decay.

The beauty lies in the opposition between destruction and creation. People would do well to remember that destruction implies the chance to build anew.

wimp.com/crowddances

Keep a tennis ball and a hacky sack handy for healthy entertainment in dull times and to relieve agression. Especially useful in small spaces. Surrounding flat surfaces and various objects are fair game. If you annoy the neighbors, count it as a bonus.

—to name a few.

i dream of the tragic desperation of an aged king… of perfect harmonic cadences… of ships lost on tumultous seas… of a beggar girl’s queenly radiance

No matter. The end result is (usually) delicious and, for me, cooking is synonymous with edible creative experimentation. What’s not to love?