Suburban Goddess

I’m happy with my life. Seriously. But I’m just a bit neurotic about a few things, and I think if I medicated myself, then perhaps I wouldn’t be so bitchy about them.

Take my husband’s’ socks, for example. He likes to take them off immediately after he sits down, and the socks remain there until I pick them up. Regardless of where he’s sitting. Which means I find dirty socks under the coffee table, in front of the toilet, in bags close to the sofa, or, when he’s trying to be funny, ON the kitchen table. They’re just socks, nothing life threatening. Worst case scenario, my newly-crawling daughter buzzes by me with a dirty sock hanging from her mouth. She’ll live. So why do socks drive me so crazy?

And the piles. Endless piles of stuff strew from my back door to the bedroom. He likes to empty his pockets upon entering a room, and the little piles all over the house make it look like the entire house is drowning under little piles of change, reciepts, and car knick-knacks.

Another example… my cubicle neighbor calls and talks to her customers. Why does this bother me so much? Is it because it makes her look like a better designer than me? Is it because she CARES about what her customers think? Why do I care anyway?

I truly have nothing in life to complain about. I have a very loving (albeit messy, but I am too), loyal and absolutely wonderful husband, a beautiful child, and every material thing in life I ever needed. A beautiful house. Great cars. Fun job. So what is the deal?

Is it time for the happy pills when you start to have to FIND stuff to bitch about?

I used to be an incredibly focused person. Used to be. Enter Chip, my husband.

Chip has what I like to call The Idea of The Day (IOTD). Sometimes it’s drastic (”Let’s move!”), sometimes it’s not (no example comes to mind, here.) He is constantly dreaming up new & exciting projects. The list is almost as long as the list of cars he has owned since we’ve been together. Some of these IOTD’s could be amazing business propositions. Some of them could create one-of-a-kind collectibles that might catapult him into a new realm of fame never before encountered. Almost all of them are expensive in either a financial or emotional way.

There was a time when these IOTD’s would send me into mini panic attacks. I’ve always been a stay-in-on-place kind of girl, and the very few times I tried to step out of my happy little box, things ended traumatically. Then, as years passed and these IOTD’s slowly faded into ADD oblivion, I came to realize if I didn’t like what he proposed, all I have to do is keep my mouth shut & wait. Two days later, it’s gone. Completely. Never existed.

You see, Chip is my first experience with adult ADD. He hasn’t been officially diagnosed, but we both know he has it. It’s a running joke between us; he needs to go to the doctor but he keeps forgetting. The fact of the matter is, I wouldn’t change it for the world. I love our quirky, crazy life. If he was medicated, it would supress all the characteristics that I love about him. Now, that being said, I’ve discovered a horrible side effect of ADD.

It’s contagious.

Recently, I’ve begun to notice I have too many ideas. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, but I forgot what it is I was supposed to be doing. Case in point: this website. ADD perfectly illustrated. Where is it going? What is the focus? WHAT THE HELL DOES SHE DO? Is she a designer? A photographer? A video editor? A webmaster? A sculptor? I can’t answer that. I know that if I could find my focus again, I could be very successfully self-employed. But if I medicate myself to cure my newly-aquired ADD, I might lose the very creativity that drives me to pursue all of these interests.

Focus, focus… where the hell was I going with this?

I am a walking fashion mess, and I am perfectly okay with that. I can’t justify spenging hundreds of dollars on clothes that I will only wear for a season. (I’d much rather spend that money on something functional, like a kiln!) So I often recycle clothes for years, wearing them until I can’t patch the holes anymore.

I have to say, there is a great deal of art influencing fashion, and I appreciate that. I appreciate the Mona Lisa also, but I can’t justify buying it, hanging it on my wall, and staring at it everyday. Just like fashion, I’ll get tired of looking at it, and it will become just another THING in my house that takes up space and is completely taken for granted. It’s like eating Cheerios everyday. I hate Cheerios.

Houston fashion is something completely unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. Women here like sparkly, glittery things. Perfectly coifed Japanese-straightened platinum hair and razor sharp French manicured claws. I’ve often heard the mumbles & grumbles as I walk by in my cargo shorts & huge frumpy T-shirts. The little snickers and insults that women are so adept at. At 5′11″, all it takes is a mere glance in their petite direction to shut them up. But I don’t begrudge them their Gucci and Prada. I admire their taste. Beautiful things for beautiful people.

I’m just not a sparkly, glittery kind of girl anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. I just choose not to participate.

Quite often I come across instructions to “include picture in ad.” I then turn the page to find Joe Blow’s picture taken at high noon with every wrinkle, blemish, and horrible imperfection prominently displayed in the most hideous photographs known to man.

I’m not ugly, per se, but I’m no beauty queen, and I’m okay with that. I would NEVER want my picture in my advertising because it is SO true; a picture speaks a thousand words. People would look into my beady little eyes and immediate think, “She looks condescending. I don’t think I’ll call her.” It amazes me that so many people in life are in complete denial. What is the purpose of putting your photo in your advertising? Do you think it will jog someone’s memory?

“Oh yeah, I remember that face! I think I’ll call that guy to fix my air conditioner!”

Seriously, why??? If you need fifteen minutes of fame, run down to your local bar and sing karaoke or something. At least that won’t defer people from giving you business (unless you’re a really bad singer). Photographs serve absolutely no purpose other than feeding your ego and wasting valuable white space. Class is not defined by your Glamour Shot. Even if you were blessed with a beautiful face, advertise your BUSINESS, not yourself. Your graphic artist will thank you for it.

After plowing through hundreds of crappy ads, a graphic designer starts to lose use of their vocabulary skills. It’s a past-time of my department to inadvertently make up our own language. One girl, Jennifer, is rather adept at this skill. Luckily, she has a great since of humor about it. Some of my personal favorites: mushy-brained (tired at the end of the day), paginitation (pagination), and my absolute favorite; the spelling of the word wreath (REEF).

She’s British. It’s not her fault.

I’ve decided to start documenting our language faux-pas here. One struck me as particularly humorous this morning. This one came from another artist, but it’s still worthy of sharing.

“While returning grief-strucken from one funeral, the woman found out her other brother was dead, too.”

I’m grief-strucken that the English language has to endure such brutality…

I hate Christmas. Before you recoil in terror and label me a Grinch… let me make my point.

First, from a graphics standpoint, it is a logistical nightmare. Red & green are NOT meant to go together. You can argue the color wheel theory to me ’til your blue in the face, but you will never convince me that the Xmas color scheme is beautiful.
I actually like the “blue” Christmas thing, but you have to live in my household to understand that a single color scheme will NEVER happen…(Christmas tree stories for another day…)

But people are generally MEANER around Christmas. Everyone is hassled because they actually have to go out and shop. Then they stress out because they’re short on cash. All of this manifests into vicious cases of road rage (guilty), which in turn makes 90% of adults grumpy, mean & spiteful. Merry Freakin’ Christmas.

I’m truly hoping that the joy on my daughter’s face will redeem this lost holiday for me. I don’t expect much this year beyond drool and a smile (she thinks the dog is the coolest thing in the world). But I want to be transported back to a time when Christmas was fun & happy for somebody besides the credit card companies…

In my profession, a sleek website is absolutely essential. So I’m browsing the web for resources, and I am completely flabbergasted at the prices of Flash elements. If you want sound on your website, (decent sound), it’s going to cost you. So I, being the ultimate cheapskate and digital Martha Stewart, decided to start my own sound foundry. The site will be called the DJ Skye Project, and it will include FREE downloadable Flash loops. I understand there are many people out there trying to make a buck on the Web, but is it truly necessary to charge $200 for a collection of 50 sound loops? And people wonder why Limewire is so damned popular…

So, if you’re a budding Flash sound artist and you want to get your name out there, I invite you to drop me a line and I will feature you on my site. You know as soon as you put the words “FREE download,” there’s gonna be some traffic…

Today is my boss’s 50th birthday. In a not-so-clever attempt to protect his personal items, he locked his office door and removed part of the locking mechanism is a feeble attempt to keep the graphics department from defacing everything.

Silly man. Don’t you know graphic designers are theives & liars?

“Of course we wouldn’t do anything to your office, sir…”

Three hundred balloons, 3 boxes of Hefty bags, and four bags of glitter later…voilá! A virtual birthday masterpiece. We were going for the ball-pen effect, and I’m proud to say as he waded knee-deep in black balloons, I think we succeeded.

Never, never, never trust any department that has the word “creative” in it.