The Third Act

Apology:

I tried all day yesterday to get one of my thoughts to coalesce, but none would. I was thinking too hard, “that’s too much like yesterday’s…that’s political again…that’s too convoluted…horrible grammar…blah, blah, blah.” And then I left to do some shopping and ended up sitting at a restaurant table with a friend who called to have me join her in between our errands and that went on for two hours because we both love to talk and have lots in common or are trying to find more of our commonalities because we like each other and want to learn how each other thinks and why and not get into a ‘fight’ because we think we think differently about something until we explain where we are coming from. We may agree to disagree but want to still stay friends.

Good relationships are very hard and I don’t have many for that very reason.

I’d had great hopes for one of the beginnings of writing yesterday that I started out because I got excited about this picture and it made me think of the lifestyle I love and want to aspire to and, for a fair measure, have.

The story had to do with a chaise longue and of lying on it with a quilt and a puppy like Puggles in the crook of my knee on a cool, fall day but I couldn’t get the narrative to quit streaming in continuum as if there was no such thing as a period.

That is a room in the home of a most fabulous man who knits and sews and quilts and paints and gardens and collects and does mosiacs and murals and has the largest collection of beautiful things that have been created by his own hands that I have ever seen. Kaffe Fassett. He’s all about color and I love color too. I just can’t figure out how he does it all.

And then, because of that same image that I wanted so to use, I started another one about being a designer and the conflict that exists in that world about what it means to be a designer and how snobby designer types with ASID affiliations are adamant to make sure that no one who does ‘mere’ decorating can ever claim to be a designer no matter what they claim unless they have that same ASID (or similar) affiliation and that if one doesn’t have ASID (or similar) affiliation they are only and ever can or will be ‘merely’ decorators and they say it completely condescendingly.

I did not and would not get ASID affiliation because I thought it was just snobbery and I believed in my talent.

So just by coincidence, while I was out shopping and running errands and talking with my friend, I came home with a movie starring Huge Grant and Marisa Tomei, The Rewrite, about a man who had had a one-time hit and was on the third act of his own life and had been reduced to teaching writing because “Hollywood is about the young and up and coming” and he was no longer either. He kept insisting that writing can’t be taught, you either have a talent or you don’t he claimed and no amount of teaching can change that.

I won’t spoil the ending just in case you want to watch it.

It reminded me of the time in my own career when I was seen as not a team player because I was the design person and to them, seemed unwilling to teach anyone how I did things. I kept thinking to myself, you can’t teach talent, and I did have talent — it’s not a brag, it’s a fact — but what I was doing was something that required intuition and a certain kind of eye for seeing things. I was on the top of a tall ladder making a straight piece of yardage become a balloon valance with pins and staples and draping and they wanted me to teach what I was doing. “Come on up here,” I said and they did and went right back down, saying “Go ahead with what you are doing, but you really need to be more of a team player.”

Blah, blah, blah.

At any rate, I get very excited at great design and think that image is a perfect account of what good design is all about. Now someone might say that that room has just ‘merely’ been decorated, not designed. But I know that Kaffe ‘designed’ every. single. detail… to get those ‘decorations’ just right.

It would take another whole post to account for how ‘mere’ decorating can be designing — and if you ask I’ll do it.

I’ll try harder to be a team player.

But mostly, I just wanted to apologize for yesterday’s very shoddy offering. I was in an utter panic at the end of a fruitless typing, (it can’t be called writing), day. There is a clever short story linked in it that I found in the panic of trying to find references for fifty shades of purple. I like the way she uses punctuation and italics and such to denote speakers.

This will be it for today. There are just times when writing drains the pools of thinking and the day before yesterday was one of those days. I actually edited that offering umpteen times after ‘publishing’ because I keep feeling like too much had been left unsaid and required too much reading between lines. So, for any early birds, you might, (or might not), enjoy the rewrite(s).

Happy Trails.

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