ah, the blank page. only now it’s not entirely blank…whereas the written page gets out of the way, so to speak, with only the lines or spiral wire, this is always a framework of how on top of the meat of what.
I have been thinking a lot about words at work, as I get more into driving everything towards templates ($DEITY bless WordPress), and worrying less about what it looks like and more what it says.
and at the same time, I am trying to be more imaginative, more inventive, in my visual design. after all, I got to this design thing sort of backwards: words first, the pretty stuff later. I’m quite aware of my struggles with creating beauty. it’s a lot like my struggles with music, when I was younger; I can get there with a lot of practice, but it never really flows.
unlike music, though, I enjoy practicing.
when I was packing up things in my (home) office a couple of weeks ago, I found a stack of sheet music, and realized that I actually wasn’t sure anymore how to turn those symbols into sounds. I was so overwhelmed that I just about burst into tears.
actually, I had a couple of moments of almost-tears that day, sorting through things I hadn’t looked at in a while. there’s something emotionally….insane? intense? about keeping all the letters and photos and whatnot that I’ve managed to hold onto all these years. (ha! all these years, as though I were 80. though I hestitate to think about Grandma Nelson, and her cache of _stuff_ — for lack of a better term — as I consider my boxes.) at the very least, I’m gripped by overwhelming nostalgia and memory when I flip through a box of postcards.
for several years, I collected postcards; my favorites went up on the “Wall O’ Women” — they were mostly women I admired or thought lovely, or art of women, that sort of thing. I took down the last Wall O’ Women, I think, when we moved out of the studio apartment that had been mine along and into that tiny apartment in the old cut-up house. (I should find the poem about that building.) I haven’t put it up since, and in most of that 7 (?!) years, the whole collection has been stuffed into a box.
I went through them, looking for visual inspiration for this thing, something I could repurpose to design my site. now I’m keeping them in a wooden box on my desk so I can flip through them more often, and maybe one of these days I’ll come up with a good way to display them again.
there’s another piece to that story, which I’ve been mulling over since then, but I actually need to run right now. I might come back to it later; that all depends.
(on what? — mostly, on where I am with myself, and writing about myself…which is by way of being coy, I suppose.)