Chapter 01 / Arrival
Professional life is rarely a ladder. This one is a network.
01 / An introduction
I’ve had a lot of jobs.
That makes my life sound more deliberate than it was. Most of the time, it was necessity. Sometimes curiosity. Sometimes the feeling that I could learn something and be useful.
This site is about me. A career path is just one of the lenses.
These aren’t milestones. They’re some of the things I noticed on the way.
02 / Work / a recurring pattern
I’ve worked in places that seemed to have very little to do with one another—ballparks, magazines, restaurants, corporate offices.
Until recently, I rarely arrived as the expert.
I learned the room. The official rules, the rules people actually followed, who knew how everything worked, and who the system expected to quietly work around it.
Different places. Different work. Usually the same first instinct: pay attention before deciding what needed to change.
Some of the rooms — Portland Sea Dogs · Aloha2Go · Fidelity · National Parks
See some of the rooms03 / Accessibility / intention
Accessibility is where my work became intentional.
I stayed with it. I learned enough to become an expert, then discovered that expertise doesn’t matter if there is no role, authority or structure for it to live in. More than once, I had to describe the job before I could do it—including my own.
The work has taken different forms: contracts, governance, training, culture, language and public experience. The question underneath has remained the same: who is being asked to do extra work simply to participate?
Accessibility gave me the chance to do what I had been circling in every other job: learn the room, then change who the room was built to admit.
Chapter 02 / Writing & attention
One thread through many forms. Accessible descriptions - Food Magazine - Haiku
04 / Writing / access
I’ve written more than 250,000 pieces of alt text and extended image description.
That number sounds industrial. The work never was.
Every image asked the same questions in a different form: What matters here? What order allows the meaning to arrive? What am I assuming because I can see it? What can I leave out without deciding, for someone else, what they do not get to know?
Description sounds neutral. It isn’t. Every sentence decides what comes forward and what disappears.
Accessibility taught me that writing is not only expression. Sometimes its job is to let someone in.
05 / Writing / place
I love food. I distrust a lot of food writing.
It can make a place sound like it was waiting to be discovered—a culture reduced to something ordered, photographed and rated.
At Aloha2Go, the food was the entrance, not the whole story. A plate could hold migration, family, scarcity, celebration, adaptation and memory. Someone made it. Someone taught them. Someone decided what could change and what needed to remain.
I wanted the writing to keep those people in the frame.
Writing about a place means remembering that it was already alive before you arrived.
Aloha2Go · food, culture and the responsibility of representation
Enter the writing world06 / Writing / no assignment
Most of my writing has no job.
It begins as a text I may or may not send. Something strange seen through a coffee-shop window. A sentence written down before it disappears. Ten minutes taken back from a bad day at work.
Without an assignment, I can follow what caught me before deciding what it means. Some pieces become poems. Some remain notes. Some are imperfect because I was imperfect when I wrote them.
Sometimes my writing is not a finished idea, but me noticing someone noticing, wanting, worrying, laughing and trying to make sense of things while they are still happening. It helps me in ways I can’t explain.
The writing doesn’t need to resolve the moment. It just needs to keep me from losing it.
Chapter 03 / Systems & accessibility
The writing thread enters organizations—contracts, education, governance, culture, and public experience.
07 / Accessibility / change
Accessibility is easy to support in principle. The resistance usually begins when it asks for time, money, authority or a change in how things have always been done.
I’ve watched it become everyone’s value and no one’s responsibility.
Sometimes diplomacy worked. Other times I had to be stubborn. I asked again after the meeting had moved on. Put it back on the agenda. Named the gap after the room had agreed the work was finished. Helped turn good intentions into roles, standards, training and accountability.
At times, I was sandpaper.
Sandpaper creates friction because friction is the work. It wears down what people have learned to accept so something more equitable can take its place.
Some of the work I’m proudest of began when I was unwilling to give up.
08 / Systems / a final note
The contract was eleven pages long before anyone asked whether the person signing it could read it.
I dislike bureaucracy. I’m very good at building it.
The difference is whether it protects people or protects itself.
The conventional door
The exploratory homepage opens into a useful website underneath it.
