Interests

Shorthand

• MBTI

  ENFJ

  Extraverted · Intuitive · Feeling · Judging

• Sign

  Leo

  July 23 to August 22

• Water

  Salish Sea

  Seattle, Pacific Northwest

Also a fan of

• Orca
• Pickleball
• Kraken
• Seahawks
• Kosaku Shima
• Lorde
• Tarantino
• Melville
• Magnets & mugs

• Salt water

  Orca. The Southern Residents work the Salish Sea in three pods, J, K and L, and a sighting cannot be scheduled: either you happen to be watching the right stretch of water or you miss it entirely. That is most of the appeal. The Salish Sea chart is drawn around the same water, orcas included.

• Courts and ice

  Pickleball was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, one ferry ride from downtown Seattle, which makes playing it here less of a trend than a local custom. Kraken and Seahawks cover the ice and the turf: Climate Pledge Arena at Seattle Center, Lumen Field at the south end of downtown.

• Print

  Kosaku Shima. Kenshi Hirokane has been serialising it since 1983, one salaryman's entire career inside one company, promotion by promotion. It is the only long-running fiction I know that treats an org chart as a plot, which is a strange thing to find comforting after a decade in one place.

  Melville is the other end of the shelf. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York and wrote on the side, an arrangement any engineer who writes will recognise, and Moby-Dick puts the shelf back where this page opened: out on the water, following a whale. It is also the book that ties Pike Place to Nantucket. Starbucks took its name from the coffee-loving first mate, and the island is where the book weighs anchor.

• Screen and headphones

  Tarantino for structure. The chapters land out of order and the real reveal is what the order was. Lorde for the opposite move: one voice with a great deal of empty space left around it, and nothing added to fill the space.

• The shelf

  Magnets and mugs, counted by city rather than by country. It is the cheapest travel log there is and the only one I have never let fall behind. The globe keeps the same habit in another form: every pin carries a date.

The globe and the Salish Sea charts →