Philippe Lazaro
OCTOBER 2016

How I Fight

When the world feels chaotic and absurdist and a bit like that over-the-top melee scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s helpful to remember that it’s all just a set up for Ke Huy Quan’s monologue: 

“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned how to survive…this is how I fight.”

The disgust and overwhelm… it’s reasonable, but also by design. It’s harder for people to stand up for each other when they’re burned out, and people who benefit from injustice know that. Here are some tips to not get played:

Focus on your area of impact and go deep. It’s so much better than chasing the latest outrage around in circles. For things that feel a little more out of reach, find some orgs already doing work and show them some love.

Spend more time with people. In person. Don’t be isolated. Some nights you’ll feel like you have to push yourself a little bit, but it’s worth it in the end.

Remember that the news will show you a lot of terrible things, but it won’t remind you that somebody got their first kiss this week and feels a thousand feet tall. Or that some kid just discovered The Fugees for the first time. Or that some grandparent is getting to course correct regrets they had with their own kids.

And know that it’s sometimes hard to find foods in the center of the good-for-you and tastes-good venn diagram, but kimchi exists and lives in that space.

February 2025

Tank and the Bangas

In my dad era, I don’t get to go out to see live music too often. That’s made me get a little too precious about the shows I go to, wanting to use these rare occasions to see longtime favorite artists.

But you know what?

There’s something special about going to see an artist whose work you don’t know inside-out. An artist whose vibe you’re familiar with, who you’re confident can put on a show, just one you haven’t spent a ton of time with. Then going to their show and getting treated to a p e r f o r m a n c e.

This was Tank and the Bangas last night. They get the party going.

Knafeh ice cream date

Good taste starts early.

COMMUNITY MURAL

Weekend events: Took the big twin out on a ramen centric field trip and wound up watching the halftime show from a sports fan gear store by the border.

Also worked on a mural.

AWARD WINNING

Probably gonna have to retire from nonprofit marketing now that the perfect fundraiser has already been done.

BEST DATE + BEST DATE CRASHER

The past week the whole feed has been like:

What marketers can learn from Kendrick Lamar

What event coordinators can learn from Kendrick Lamar

What couples wanting to improve communication can learn from Kendrick Lamar

What suburban beekeepers can learn from Kendrick Lamar

And I’m not mad at it.

Given what the feed has looked like since mid-January, please keep it coming. I can’t wait to achieve the perfect at-home puff pastry by learning from Kendrick Lamar.

$800 to Senegal

The downside to tracking flights the way I do is having full visibility of all the great deals I can’t take.

$550 to Amsterdam. Saw a $800 round trip from San Diego to Senegal this month. I have yet to do West Africa.

Paddington in Peru

Daddy daughter date with the bear who never lets us down.

While 1&2 set an almost impossibly high bar, happy to say 3 does a pretty good job keeping up. Antonio Banderas was a good pick to pick up Hugh Grant’s goofy villain baton. The diaspora/immigration themes are a bit more pronounced in Peru, but to good effect.

REPLAY TOYS

Stumbled upon a used toys store in town recently. Replay Toys. The people running this shop have a good thing going on! Store full of throwback gems. Not quite flea market prices, but a very good likelihood you’ll encounter a childhood fave you forgot about. Spent over an hour in here with Rhys just exploring and could’ve spent longer.

corner club

I’ve been really digging this EP.

If you’re in the mood for some real simple, sweet songwriter indie with clever lines, don’t miss out on corner club.

MAKIN’ BOOCH

I made some booch!

Happy with the results considering this was my first attempt ever. Went with chopped mango and mango-habanero syrup to feed my second fermentation.

Notes:

Fresh fruit is my preference for the second fermentation since it seems to produce the best carbonation.

I’m on my third batch now using the same mother and it’s getting better flavor each round.

Good Work

No need to overcomplicate what good work looks like.

Make it about something bigger than yourself and love the process. Be more invested in being fully present to the process than the results.

I feel like my reading has been light lately, but here are some recent standouts…

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry – I picked this up because Min Jin Lee cited it as a key inspiration for Pachinko, one of my all time faves. It’s similar in its epic scale, this time weaving a story through the lives of a whole bunch of characters over a few decades min India.

I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer – Youngmi’s unrestrained honesty has always been a hallmark of her comedy and it translates really well into memoir.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer – Kimmerer does what she’s proven to do extremely well… take nature’s lessons and put them into some gorgeous and compelling writing.

Playground by Richard Power – I loved The Overstory and had high hopes for this. Some things I thought worked really well. I like that he went for a more lighthearted tone compared to The Overstory. He pulls some familiar moves, like interpolating a character based on a real world scientist, and I wish the tech themes were toned down since those also featured so prominently in The Overstory.

James by Percival Everett – The hype is real on this one. Loved the character of James and the whole conversation around performance that keeps coming back around.

Those misty morning runs

The Slow Times

This year, I feel like I’ve seen a bunch of people remark how long things have felt. One month feels like an eternity. Especially January!

But we all know in December we’ll all be freaking out perplexed about how the end’s already here and we’re in the latter half of the decade.

Learning how to appreciate the boring times and liminal spaces makes life so much bigger.

Marathon in Nairobi, pt. 2

The hard part of the marathon is the middle, right?

Not long after the halfway point of my marathon, my leg seized up. This was frustrating, because this was the exact injury I trained to avoid. I pretty much did everything I could think of to prevent it, and it struck surprisingly early.

My calf cramped. A cramp that was basically like the fastest, most severe charlie horse I’ve encountered. The calf muscle locked up rock-hard, harder than I’m capable of flexing it. And it hurt bad. Like a rubber band that’s supposed to control the leg movement just snapped.

I had to drop to the road and clutch it, which I’m sure looked alarming to the other runners. One offered to fetch an ambulance, but I knew what this was so I asked her to not. One kind Samaritan stopped, said that this thing happened to him too, and gave it a powerful massage until it started loosening up.

But I still had double-digit miles to go, and I knew I would have to walk a few of them. This totally shifted my approach to the rest of the race.

Improv Update

Be revolutionary. Stop taking yourself too seriously.

Life on stage has been a riot. At the end of the year, I auditioned for a house team at our theatre and made it. Freestyle rap improv continues to be the surprisingly delicious hobby shaking up my mid-30s.

Some chances to see me on stage in the near future:

Metal People: 1/24
Pacific Quiche: 2/7, 2/21, 3/7, 3/21
Optimus Rhyme: 3/21
Freestyle Class Recitals: 1/30, 2/20

Toni Morrison

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

–Toni Morrison

Marching orders, Creative Changemakers. The world is in need of better, more beautiful stories.

Marathon in Nairobi, pt. 1

A common pipeline:

“I hate running”
to
“Okay, I did a half marathon and actually feel good about myself”
to
“Could I do a full marathon?”

I’ve been on that trajectory for the past several years. Last year, I decided, maybe now’s the time?

The thing is, training is pretty time demanding, and that’s not something I have a lot of these days. It’s also physically demanding. I decided to approach this race as if it might be the only marathon I ever run.

So with that being the case, I wanted to run somewhere epic.

So how about…
The country that seems to the best runners all over the world?
The country that holds the world marathon record, and eight of the top ten finishes?
A country where, even if I came in last, I could still feel good about myself knowing I ran with the best?

The Nairobi Marathon

26.2 miles/42km in Nairobi

This is one of the wildest ideas I’ve had come true, one of the most demanding things I’ve put my body through, and something I still can’t believe happened. Finishing a marathon in the home country of the world’s best runners.

I would gladly break the space-time continuum to visit my 14 year old self who hated running, struggling through the mile, to trot up next to him like, “bro, you are not gonna believe what happens in a couple decades…”

dodgerblue

Kendrick feat. Shohei on the dodger blue remix?

At this point I wouldn’t put anything past Ohtani. But since it’s not exactly in my ability to coordinate the two hopping in the studio, I did the next best thing and drew him and Decoy into the gnx carpool.

Since this is the most LA piece I’ve ever done, I put it up in my shop as a canvas and a trading card preorder, with sales going to help wildfire relief through Baby2Baby.

Kelvin Kiptum

Kelvin Kiptum is the fastest marathoner of all time. He broke the world record in 2023 in Chicago with the time of 2:00:35.

Nobody has ever finished under 2:00:00. I don’t know how, but experts estimated that based on the rates of how people have gotten stronger and faster over time, it might happen in 2070. But if anyone could speed up that timeline, it would’ve been Kiptum. He only debuted in 2022, running a 2:01 in Valenica, and at only 24 years old, he could reasonably break his own record.

Sadly, he was killed in a car accident about this time last year. The Nairobi City Marathon this year was dedicated to his legacy.

2025, what if

My “what’s in” post last year turned out to be scarily accurate, so what if this year we:

▶️ Sleep in (five times)
▶️ Start making chai at home
▶️ Keep the plants alive
▶️ Sell prints of my artwork
▶️ Ignore social media growth
▶️ Delight in how nuanced and complex people are
▶️ Celebrate TEN Years of being married with a grown ups only trip
▶️ Stop using trips as an excuse to skip running and instead run in cool new places
▶️ Live every day like 2025 was an album with no skips

2024

Here’s to Finland and Pre-Kindergarten and marathon training and trying not to get sick again and freestyle rapping and Portugal-and-Spain and kaya toast with coffee and ducking branches while riding in a truck bed and being the Wario to my kids’ Mario Bros. and dipping in the Essequibo River and Juniper’s lyrics and so many more things.

Amidst all the highlights, there were also a lot of stretches that tested my endurance. The back-end of the year especially seemed to demand everything out of me. But sometimes all you can do is step back and say, that was a tough one, but I’m proud of how I showed up.

Here’s hoping there’s a few things you can say that about at the end of this year.

Rhys' First Passport

Kid passports are valid for five years, meaning the one I got Rhys as his very first Christmas present is about to be retired. (And replaced, of course!)

But this little booklet has given us some incredible adventures, hasn’t it?

Traveling with kids is different. But a love for other cultures and exploring and a sense of being able to do big things is something I want to pass on to them. And I’m so glad we say yes to a lot of our wild ideas.

That Space You Crave

I have it good. I can’t deny that.

I think of how I get to spend my day. The working hours I spend doing things I love… storytelling, being creative. I get to do this in service of climate vulnerable communities around the world. What a treat. It gives me so many opportunities to meet people and see where they live. How they live.

My home hours I get to spend with the greatest people of earth, three of whom just arrived in the past few years. It’s chaos a lot of the time, but also a delight. It’s the family life I always prayed for.

Even in the margins, the moments of play, I get so much opportunity to do what I love. Improv and illustration and running.

I should be enthusiastically enamored with every single moment, right?

Well, if not totally at that level, I should at least be able to recognize that almost every activity that comprises my day is something that I chose. That at one point I decided, “I would really like to be doing that with my life.”

And I recognize that this is a privilege, one that eludes so many people.

So why do I spend so many days feeling uneasy about not getting everything done on time? Why does it feel like I’m often trying to get a task “just over with” rather than sitting and savoring each one?

Is this what happens when you have too much of a good thing? When you have so many ideas and ambitions you’re trying to serve that you end up crowding out the things that make each one special?

It’s a common “area to work on” I get about my creative work. It actually doesn’t surprise me much that the feedback applies more broadly to my life.

There’s a scene in an episode from Full House that sticks with me quite a bit.

Now, I haven’t actually seen the episode or scene in over twenty years, so my memory is quite fuzzy. But the fact that I think about it somewhat regularly must mean there’s a big of, um, emotional truth that lodged its way into my long term storage.

It’s a day when for whatever reason, Danny Tanner winds up spending the whole day with his girls. They visit a cool aquarium, head out on the town, and do a bunch of cool 1990s San Francisco-y things.

After all that excitement, he’s tucking them in at night… most likely in those beds with the giant pencils for bedposts. But in spite of such an awesome day, one of his kids is sad. (DJ, perhaps? Feels like a DJ kind of move.)

Anyways, he asks her what’s wrong, and she explains that she had a hard time enjoying the day with the knowledge that at some point it had to be over.

This is about as existential as TGIF had ever gotten, but it’s a thought that had the air of familiarity.

I’ve been there.

Knowing that what’s in front of you is the best thing ever, but that it’s not gonna stick around forever. It can’t. You know you should be happier about the fact that it’s unfolding right now! That it’s right there, in front of your face. You can’t be any more within the moment. And yet, the awareness that it’s temporary seems to pull you out of it.

What’s a 1990s sitcom kid supposed to do in a Netflix limited series kind of world?

Recently, I found myself unpacking my bags in Paramaribo, Suriname to a clash of feelings.

I was happy to be there, exploring one of the least visited countries in South America. I was appreciative of how much opportunity I had to travel lately. Seeing new places made me feel more alive.

At least usually.

This time around, however, I was also dead tired. I found myself thinking that I wish the trip could be happening at a different time. After I’d had a moment to decompress from a recent busy season.

That night, I decided to forgo an extra opportunity to explore in order to go real slow, read, and draw in the hotel room. It felt a bit wrong, having gone so far and having made it to such an under-the-radar destination, but spending the first night this way. But deep within I knew that this was the right choice that would make the trip as a whole more enjoyable.

Such a decision, and the feelings that led to it, come with a tinge of guilt.

I’m really fortunate and privileged to be able to do what I do. To have work that allows me to travel and to be creative. To have a family life that is able to accommodate it. To have so many pieces in play that allow me to do what I love. I know that’s not something everybody has, and I know that it’s not something that comes easy.

So to take that gift and squander it on an early night in?

Over the past year, I’ve brushed up several times against the phenomenon that having too many good things in one space often diminishes each one. It’s a trend that repeats in visual art, in gardening, and in how we live our lives.

The space in between is important.

The kids have recently reconfigured their sleeping arrangements.

Everyone’s now at an age where it makes more sense to split the twins and have my boys be roommates. The tuck-in routine has a new rhythm.

I have such a wild relationship with tuck-in time.

On one hand, the hours from 6-9 PM are routinely the most chaotic. It’s usually when the kids tend to have the highest energy and the lowest patience for each other. It’s also when the chores converge. Dinner and dishes and clean up time, and on certain nights, bathtime, trash collection, and lunch packing.

After finally crossing off each item, things finally end with stillness. Storytime. Prayer. Perhaps a random conversation or tender moment with one of the kids. And when they’re drifting off is when I remember different chapters of doing this routine. At one, in a crib. At three, in a toddler bed. At five, with a brother as a new roommate. The stillness and sweetness is a strange aftertaste, post-chaos.

And this has been pretty much every night for the past five years.

And then I spend a good chunk of whatever’s left in the day watching shows, reading, drawing, and hanging with Deanna, but in the back of my mind is how quickly the kids are growing and how amazing they are. I want to make sure I’m savoring the parenting journey, knowing that more experienced parents have all said it goes by too fast at a rate of 100%. At one point, I didn’t even know if a family like this was possible. If it would be in the cards for us. And now, it’s the spitting image of abundance.

A stray meme once told me, “parenthood is largely rushing your kids along, trying to get them to hurry up and go to bed, so you can then whip out your phone and scroll through all the photos you took of them throughout the day.”

Pretty much sums it up.

Right now, the most urgent thing in my life is to remove as much urgency as possible.

How many tasks could be enjoyable, if only they didn’t end with the qualifier “by the end of the day”?

How much more enjoyable would the night time routine be if you didn’t feel like you abandoned a work task mid-flow, just to get these responsibilities taken care of, before jumping back in? What if you actually shut your laptop with the aim of shutting it down? And what if allowed you to better remember that this tuck in time is bonding time? A time to meet the kids in their goofiness and to play?

And what if each time you took on the work tasks, you did so with less urgency and more space? What if opening up all the files you’re working on could feel like a musician hopping into the studio, ready to tap into a flow state and get into a groove?

What if the space in between activities, in between trips, in between adventures was restful and open, allowing you to reflect on those adventures properly? And then whenever your next trip rolls around, it doesn’t feel like an add-on, but a whole distinct entree in and of itself. It’s value is there.

Artistic mastery often looks like understanding the value of space. The expansiveness of the worlds created by Hayao Miyazaki not wanting to rush through an exposition. The way Justin Vernon lingers on every single note until he’s good and ready to move to the next one. The way Min Jin Lee took 30 years to work on Pachinko, letting its story span eight decades, and in doing so creating a watershed epic novel. Even in trying to hang up some of my artwork around the house, I recognize that there’s a point of things being too crammed. It’s a line I frequently step over.

Space is sacred. And one of my top priorities right now is to stop overscheduling. To worry less about getting stuff done.

To live the actual moment.

Scenes from 2024

Been wild, my friends.

This year had so many I-can’t-believe-this-is-my-life moments.

So many just-gotta-get-through-this stretches.

Accompanied by some just-wanna-freeze-this moments.

One of the things in life that will always fascinate me is the relationship between difficulty and beauty, and this year drives home that point. Few things came easy, yet there were so many moments that felt beyond rewarding.

Thanks for 2024

What an intense year 2024 turned out to be. So many peaks, some really deep pits, and a lot of gratitude to get another lap on this gift of life.

Thank you for being a big part of my journey. Whether you’re here for my art, climate work, traves, storytelling, an IRL friendship, or just like lurking because those are some eclectic interests.

Made one last longform video for the year. It’s a year that does not lend itself to being wrapped up in a bow, but here’s to looking back and forward!

Josh Gibson

Gibson the GOAT.

In the world of baseball, one of my favorite things from this year was seeing the official incorporation of Negro League statistics into the Major League recordbook, making Josh Gibson the official batting title holder of all time.

Drew this to commemorate. Josh Gibson has been featured in a lot of art, but it’s usually in black and white, or very muted color. To be fair, he played in the black-and-white era on a team called the Grays. But, I wanted to go color rich here. The league was a VIBRANT place to play.