Category: ultrapersonal

After having blood drawn this afternoon, I walked up to Grand Central to catch a train back to scenic Astoria. It was raining, so at first I assumed it was the weather and all the umbrellas that made the sidewalk on 42nd Street such a nightmare. Strolling into the station itself, I thought it might be nice to stop into the food market downstairs and pick up a nice cheese at Murray’s, but the crowds were out of freaking control! I was barely into the Great Hall when I realized that if I didn’t get out of there right away, I’d be forced to strangle someone. Huge crowds! People wandering aimlessly, cluelessly! What was up? It was a few yards closer to the subway escalator before it dawned on me: it was the afternoon before Thanksgiving, and I was in a major rail station!

It had completely slipped my mind. We’re laying low this year, so the holiday hasn’t really been on my mind. Also, after two weeks of unemployment (I like the Bohemian ring to “unemployment,” even though I’ve got piles of freelance work underway), I’ve already lost all sense of what day it is (or what time of day, usually). I had no idea I’d lost my sense of time so completely, so quickly.

Adapting to life in a home office is always a big adjustment, especially after such a long period of regular 9-to-5 drudgery. It’s a lovely adjustment, I assure you, but a big one nonetheless. The first week passes in a bit of a narcoleptic haze where every time my attention wanders I wind up taking a nap. I squeeze work in to the waking hours here and there, with a marked tendency to be most productive at night. That settles down before long (once I get back in the habit of getting enough sleep each night), but I end up sleeping late, starting to be productive in the afternoon, and plugging away into the wee hours (excepting time for social engagements here and there). It works well for me, but throws me out of sync with most of the rest of the world. In time, I’ll force a little more discipline into my schedule, but that’s still a ways off.

While I adapt, though, let me assure you that I love having no regulare job again. I may change my mind about that eventually, but for now it’s just the right thing.

I’ve been grappling with this problem in varying degrees for well over a year, but I knew I had to tough it out for a while. The problem became more acute this last Spring, but I had made a promise and didn’t want to be a dick about things. I tried, unsuccessfully, to deal with the issue as the Summer wound to a close and the real scope of the problem became clearer and clearer. It’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been able to think about for the last couple of weeks, and I’m 99.5% sure it’s time to deal with it once and for all. (As soon as I figure out if that .5% is a half-point of fear or pragmatism.)

My stable, full-time, and fairly lucrative job is killing my career. Not only is it crushing my soul, but it’s also keeping me from doing work that will help me get any further in my career of choice. Every so often, people have contacted me about freelance design projects that sound really interesting, but I’ve had to turn them down because I didn’t have the time to give them the attention they need because of my full-time non-design job. When I was applying to schools and applying for jobs, I barely had any recent work to show because I haven’t been doing any graphic design, except for basic things I’ve been able to knock out in my spare time. As far as my career goes, I don’t have a lot to show for the last few years, other than some more experience at managing large projects and a handful of excuses why a designer would stay so long at a job that regularly refuses to consider graphic design. Yes, it’s been interesting in some ways. Yes, I’ve gotten my finances back under control. Yes, I’ve taught myself that I have more patience than I thought. Yes, I’ve learned how to consider a wider scope of issues when I think about a project.

But what do I have to show for it? Not much. How can I show that the lessons I’ve learned make me a better designer? Right now, I can’t. What I need to do is design things. What I need to do is something I enjoy, something with tangible results that show what I can do. If I’m going to work as a designer, I need to work as a designer. If I’m going to get work as a designer, I’ll need to offer more than assurances and outdated work. If I’m going to take another stab at graduate school, I need to think about what I want to learn about design, not how badly I want to stop working at something else.

I think I’ve hit the tipping point. I did what I promised my employers I would do, and now they need to know if I’m going to go or if I’m going to commit to more long-term efforts. I needed to beat my debt into submission, and I have. I even feel like I’ve paid a debt to an old friend, who would surely want me to think about the future of my dreams as well as the future of my work. I think that if I don’t start doing a little of the right work, it will only get harder and harder to do more of it.

I think — no, I know — it’s time to quit the job that’s holding me back and cobble together a little work that’ll take me forward. I need time to concentrate on new projects and developing my thinking. I need time to concentrate on making things. I need time to do the work I want to do, and be the person I want to be. Isn’t a little hardship worth that?

And besides, aren’t there some of you out there who could use the services of someone like me?

Did you know that last Thursday was the fifth anniversary of this blog? I’ve been diddling with web sites for slightly longer, but my very first entry made with an automated posting tool. Blogging these days is so widespread, so taken for granted, so cliché that it amazes me that only five short years ago it was a curious fringe activity that was a little embarrassing to explain. Time sure flies when you’re trailblazing a minor media phenomenon, eh?

Of course, long-time readers will surely realize that I don’t put quite as much energy into the site as much anymore. Once a thought crystallizes during tea and toast in the morning or during evening chit-chat, It’s not as interesting for me to hash it out again later. I have my flashes of pith, but I don’t work out ideas in writing as much anymore. This could change at any time, of course, but it’s the way things go right now. Don’t abandon me yet, though: here’s still plenty of scandal and sass to read in the archives until my muse knocks me upside the head again. (And I guarantee that not one of you has read everything that I’ve buried in there.)

Thanks for all these years of playing along at home! Rock on!

The social whirlwind that was the July 4th weekend really knocked me off my daily posting schedule for the Scrapbook, so I set aside many hours for a scanning spree this weekend, hoping to fill in the backlog. I’ve overcompensated for the delayed entries by putting up lots of entries with multiple images, so go see what I’ve drawn forth from my boxes and bookcases for your entertainment.

Is that a pretty place? I like to call it “The Soul Crusher,” the place where I toil away each day, hating my life more and more all the time and dreaming of the best way to get out of that prison before it destroys my spirit altogether.

Today, luckily, is the first of my summer flex days I get to take every second Friday off in exchange for working an extra hour a day the rest of the time. A fair enough trade-off, considering that every day in my cubicle feels like an eternity already, and the extra weekdays give me a chance to loaf, window shop, run errands, and pretend I have a better life. Delusion! Whee!

One of the nice parts of the whole grad-school plan was that I’d have a concrete way to get the hell out of that place by the end of this summer. Now that the future is a little more vague, I still have to find something better to do with my time and energy. It seems less and less likely that things will ever change for the better at work, so I’m constantly looking for somewhere else to go seeing what’s around now, deciding how to adjust my portfolio, and waiting for the time to head over the wall.

Keep an eye out for the guards while I scout the perimeter.

It’s a hurry-and-wait, hurry-and-wait sorta day in my cubicle today, and list-making is an easy way to offer content without having to go off and actually have adventures to write about.

Places I’ve Lived

1. North Railroad Avenue (1970–1990): The house in Staten Island where I grew up with my folks, my three brothers, two sisters, and eventually an assortment of their spouses and children. It was originally a 2-story, 2-family home bult by my contractor uncle who built it sold it to my parents after their landlord suggested that a two-bedroom apartment might not be the best place for them and their four kids, not to mention the one gestating in my mother’s womb. Seeing as I had a pretty bucolic childhood (for New York City) and spent all of it here, I’ve always been very attached to this house, and was pretty weirded out when my parents sold it a few years ago and moved to Florida. I still have the key to the front door.
2. Sleeper Hall, West Campus (1988–1989): West Campus is three identical cinderblock boxes arranged around B.U.’s football field. If you’ve ever taken the Massachusetts Turnpike into downtown Boston, you’ve seen it. John Fox (another art-scholarship student) and I lived on the thirteenth floor, at the end of a hallway filled with jocks who practiced their pitching by throwing apples at the storage-closet door next to our room.
3. Boyd Hall (1989–1990): Zubby pulled me in to share his fantastically huge room in a turn-of-the-century brownstone reserved for people in our scholarship program. (Peter Paige lived there the year before I did.) Since we were a neurotic, over-achieving lot, Boyd Hall was High Drama at all times. Still, I had bay windows, a mantle, and 11-foot ceilings in my dorm room, which was nice.
4. Kegremont (1990–1991): My first off-campus apartment was closer to B.C. than B.U., so we were far from any of our friends but close to dozens of hard-drinking frat boys. Our street was Egremont Road, but we could see that the boys upstairs (who had a party every other weekend, and a wet bar instead of a kitchen table) had hung the street sign above their mantle and put a “K” at the start of the name. Perfection. My bedroom was in an enclosed porch over the parking lot, so most Friday nights I was lulled to sleep by the sound of guys pissing against a wall below me.
5. Brighton Ave. (1991–1992): Apartment in a neighborhood near B.U. that was effectively the off-campus dorms, where kids moved so they could escape any supervision but still walk to class. A student slum, but much easier to get back to if you ever stayed out after the T stopped running.
6. Wenham Street (1992–1995): After graduation, Zubby, Matt, Dani, and I discovered Jamaica Plain, a fantastic Boston neighborhood that had been totally off our radar until that point. We scored an incredible 2-story, 9-room apartment for $950 bucks a month. The landlord a mellow tree surgeon who lived across the street agreed to pay for a lot of badly needed renovation as long as we did the actual work. So we painted every wall, redid most of the kitchen, and had our first adult-type apartment. Miki and Brin did the same thing a few blocks away, so we had an instant neighborhood vibe. Over the course of our few years there we had lots of people come and go, and to the best of my knowledge the same lease kept changing hands for at least another four years after the original four of us had left.
7. Tremont Street (1995–1996): While shopping around for a place to live with my boyfriend at the time who had moved into Wenham St. with us for a while I had an epiphany about how ill-suited we actually were for one another. Since I was in better financial shape, I moved out and found a sweet little garret studio in the gay, gay, gay South End. This was the smallest place I’ve ever had, but it had a great view and a teeny little balcony outside the drafty bay windows. I also had a hot architect move in next door, who provided distraction after my next horrendous break-up.
8. Palmetto Street (1996–1997): When I moved back to New York, Mark and I scored an incredible 4,000-square-foot loft in Bushwick for a mere $1,500 a month. It was the place everyone fantasizes about when they imagine living in New York, before they realize that regular people can only afford to live like that if they go as far away as Bushwick. We had enough space to play whiffleball or ride bikes inside, which we did from time to time. There were many ridiculously dramatic aspects to the whole deal that made it all too ghetto for us to handle for more than a year or so, but it kind of rocked, too.
9. Clermont Ave. #1 (1997–1998): After Mark and I beat a hasty retreat from our crooked overtenant in Bushwick we found an apartment for each of us in a little old building on the sketchy side of Fort Greene. It was nice to be alone for a change while having a good friend live just upstairs. The owner/super lived next door, and he was a terrible repairman, so we lived in fear of things deteriorating worse than they already had. I often called the building “The Slanty Shanty.”
10. Clermont Ave. #2 (1998–1999): My second year in Fort Greene, I turned my apartment over to Mark and moved upstairs to an apartment that was the same size, but set up as a 2-bedroom instead of a 1-bedroom, because I wanted to make a little love nest for what would prove to be an ill-conceived reunion with the guy from the horrendous break-up of the Tremont Street apartment in Boston. He still owes me a few months rent that I don’t expect to ever see again.
11. The Swanktuary (1999–2003): after a couple of years in Fort Greene, I was jonesing to get back to loft living. I scored a cool (literally) basement loft in scenic East Williamsburg (which ain’t Bushwick, it’s only next to Bushwick), which became the de facto NYC B&B for scores or visiting and wayward bloggers over the years. There’s a lot to read about the Swanktuary in this site’s archives, but now it’s in the custody of Glenn, Charlie, and Michael.