stock photo for lazy bloggers

My life is not just spent in front of my sewing machine and this screen. Most of the hours of any given week are taken up selling wine at a boutique wine-only store. Not only does it afford me the pleasures of having a “day job” and therefore funding — barely — my design habit, I get to be a part of and representative of the wine world. Most of my sales are made through suggestions because we don’t sell Yellow Tail or Ecco Domani or just about anything else you’ve heard of. I have to explain a lot to the customers, but I think, in the end, they learn more about the wines they buy than they would if they went straight for a familiar label. I really like the part of my job that lets me engage with people about wine. It’s fun to talk about wines, to make fun of wine culture, to share drinking experiences. The best part, though, is the mental feasts I dine on throughout the evening. One of the easiest ways to make a suggestion for someone is to find out with the wine will be paired with. That simple question produces answers ranging from spaghetti & Paul Newman sauce to pan seared Copper River salmon with a sesame seed crust & a salad of microgreens with an orange and balsamic vinaigrette. The flashes of imagery my mind makes after these descriptions are better than eating any meal. For that moment, the dish is perfectly cooked with tendrils of steam rising from the plate and it’s all perfectly lit at a beautiful table, just like those shitty soft-focus pictures that food magazines are filled with. I summon the taste center of my brain for an wine accompaniment and then, mentally, the flavors highlight each others’ strengths and downplay their weaknesses perfectly. It is a moment of (food) perfection that I rarely experience in real life, but that mirrors the pleasures of designing. Design is trying to achieve the same moments of being. I see the bags as I’m designing them perfectly lit, functioning perfectly and practically. I guess those moments of, albeit fantastic, perfection create the momentum to power through the very imperfect reality of creating the meal, the bag, the days. I have to see the reality of all of my bags, but all of those meals wait in stasis, never to be loudly chewed, never to be thrown out or cleaned up after. If only that was a world more available to us everyday.

You may remember my post bitching about the problems with mintd. That was three months ago and the cause for my bitchiness has none subsided. I guess I’m posting about this again because I’m flat out surprised that something like this could survive. Every time I go to the site I’m either lucky enough to get access to a few pages or unlucky enough to get to the home page and have a little hope. It’s just another thing on my list of things I can’t believe still exist. The funny part is that I don’t here much bitching from anyone else. Whenever mintd posts a blog post, especially one about downtime or errors, everyone is so positive & forgiving I feel like I’m part of a selling support group. I love positive vibes, to be sure, and I don’t enjoy being a bitchy asshole but come on… this site is unusable. Maybe I’m just being fuckd with.

I haven’t had much to say lately because I haven’t had much to do. I made some new wrist cuffs & set them up in Subdivision & I’ve got some good designs for two smaller projects & one larger project. The two smaller projects are simple things that, even in their simplicity I have managed to draw out way too long. I’m also starting designs on the first ish backpack which really is a big project. The designs are good but I haven’t had any studio time lately and my supplies & money are running on low right now. I expect to get back into it pretty hardcore in a couple weeks.

Overall everything’s going pretty smoothly, but I do wish that whenever my business enterprises took a bad turn that someone would take a picture of me looking distressed, concerned and/or displeased & with my hand on my head. They do it for wall street traders, why not the rest of us?

Oh wait… I guess it’s because my entire life isn’t dependent on a whole bunch of numbers.