The weather, the trees and the people were all celebrating the beauty of spring.

Mono No Aware

The Sakura trees are said to embody in the Buddhist concept of mono no aware, which is the awe found in impermanence, since they bloom at once and for only about a week.

What is exceptionally fun about the festival is that it also celebrates the panoply of Japanese culture, past and present, including drumming, dancing, gaming, martial arts, manga and Anime Cosplay.

The festival is great fun for kids of all ages!

Of course it was rife with photo-tunities!

The post A Cherry Tree Blossoms in Brooklyn | Sakura Matsuri 2017 appeared first on No Stranger to Us.

The last time I was in this predicament I spent 2 hours in a Warby Parker store obsessively trying on hundreds.  I shared the top 4 picks to my social network with great success. Folks love when you ask their opinion, especially when given a finite set of choices.  So I’m looking for feedback again.  Interested?

My Myopic Transition into Adulthood

Eye glasses serve a dual purpose of bringing the outside world into sharp focus while also distancing the wearer from the world.  Spectacles are made to see the spectacle; making it clear to everyone around you that they are being observed.  At a certain point that aloofness of the nerd-set became a desirable thing that even the sighted began to desire.

I first fetishized glasses when I was about eleven years old, I would wear sunglasses all the time, even inside.  My 6th grade science teacher once called a security guard to force me to remove them; I was a rebel without a cause.  I was going through puberty and all of the patriarchs in my family, two grandfathers and my dad, wore them.  So it was not a stretch of the imagination to say that I may have associated wearing glasses with being male.  Around the same time my vision actually changed from 20/20 to much worse in under two years so testosterone and myopia in my family might be connected.  My optometrist blamed the hours of staring at a CRT monitor after school, the nerdy pursuit of computing caused my near-sightedness.

Eye Glasses Decision time!

There are 7 glasses numbered on the bottom of the gif below, two of which are pairs that I own as a scientific control.  The safety glasses are obvious, but the other pair is also Warby Parker.

The post Picking New Eye Glasses is Hard, Please Help! appeared first on No Stranger to Us.