:: must-see print design blog? this little old blog? well shucks! ::

finding out today that up up, the blog was included on a list of "50 must-see print design blogs" alongside amazing blogs like grain edit, i love typography, freshly blended, and print + pattern shocked, amazed, and humbled me.

and it guilted me into posting on this-here must-see print design blog. hmm. too bad it's ten o'clock already and time for me to call it quits before my head spins right round, round round.

check out the other blogs on the list in the time you would have spent reading a substantial blog post here on my blog. but be sure not to forget who sent you because i swear one of these days when i have an intern and a nanny and my shit together, i'll be back to my regularly scheduled blogging and free-stuff-giving.

:: how to make a decision ::

how to make a decision:

(1) obsess. for days if that's all you can swing but i really recommend a few weeks of mind-spinning, conversation-stilting obsession.
(2) make a decision.
(3) realize you're still obsessing.
(4) wash a lot of dishes while obsessing. (note: this doesn't actually help with the decision making other than to give you something constructive to do while obsessing and to clear the dishes off your counter. if you are a metaphorical person, maybe this decluttering will trick you into believing you've been spurred onward towards a decision, but really, truly, the decluttering will not spur you.)

repeat until you make a decision and discover that you are finally not obsessing anymore. then dance with glee.

** p.s. i'll let you know when i'm finally dancing with glee. as you can tell from the picture above, i'm still on step 4.

:: boombox wedding ::

just sent 65 sets of these off to oregon. i think this wedding suite speaks for itself: this was a really fun design project.

:: old when ::

it occurs to me now: you're not old until you start thinking obsessively about your past.

which is to say i'm officially old.

i can't stop looking at pictures of myself from my early twenties. myself and brian. we look so un-tired. so confident. and even though at the time i felt like a big mess and like my whole life was one big series of identity crises, i look at those pictures and just think how me i was back then.

i pulled one out to show brian and he said, "we were both so much more fashionable then." which is decidedly not true. we weren't fashionable then and we're not fashionable now. in the picture we're both wearing jeans. i've got a somewhat loose long-sleeved t-shirt on and a blue zip-up hoodie. brian's wearing a black EMS fleece jacket. and that's it. we're dressed like normal generic twenty-somethings in normal generic clothes.

but somehow he's right. we look more fashionable. maybe it's just that we look like we actually took six minutes to select our clothes. and our clothes reflected our personalities and not our vocations (brian looked in his closet the other day and shuddered: it's filled with suits and ties) or our utter lack of time, money, and interest (how many decidedly machine-washable fleece pullovers can one mom own, anyway. i've got five. no six...).

i so cannot believe how nostalgic i am for those clothes and that time. i always thought that people in their thirties who couldn't stop thinking about their so-called youths were either unhappy or had too much time to sit and think about the past, but now i know that's not it. it's just that the past is what helps us remember who we are in the present. it helps us when we're so tired that we can't think straight (brian somehow accidentally put his wallet in the junk drawer one day last week and turned the house upside down -- even the fridge -- looking for it). it helps us feel grounded. it helps us know who we were before we were parents and lawyers and whatever else we are now. it helps us remember to take just a little bit of time -- a moment here or there -- to do the things we used to like to do.

i don't want to dwell in the past but it sure is a nice place to visit every now and then.

:: branded ::

i recently sent off a nice assortment of up up creative goods to a little shop in michigan. each wholesale order i receive brings me one step closer to feeling like a real boy instead of a marrionette because each time i have to sit and think about merchandising, branding, etc.







this time around, because the order was pretty diverse, i got to work on a packaging/branding scheme that works across multiple kinds of products. here's what i came up with.

i can't get over how professional and polished everything looks. it's like a surprise to me every time i look at my own stuff. : )

:: poetry, spiders, answers, oh my! ::

i swear, my brain is like a housecat: when it finds a spider it just tortures that spider, slowly, slowly, slowly, until finally the spider just dies from trying so hard to get away. in my case it's like the spider is a particularly leggy conundrum that my brain just thinks and thinks and thinks at until finally the conundrum curls up into something shaped like an answer.

in the meantime, though, forget about trying to entice my brain with anything else. no catnip or wet food or flashlight game will distract my brain from the spider.

which is to say i'm thinky. very, very thinky. i've got a few capital-Q questions squirming around my head, spinning webs and making it very hard for me to do anything or speak to anyone. as natalie portman's character in garden state would say, i'm in it.

and so here i am hitting the keyboard hoping to kill these damned spiders dead.

spider number one is work-related. i am plagued, of late, by the feeling that the work i'm doing is too diverse. i feel very sure that if i could limit my scope a bit i could give myself the opportunity to be a lot more creative, and more creative is what i'm craving. it seems a little bit counterintuitive, perhaps, that limiting myself is what will really ultimately free me, but i just know it to be true. only i can't can't can't decide what to "give up" in order to find that focus. it's driving me insane.

i've got one idea that really excites me (and it's an idea i'm not yet ready to share) that potentially allows me to be super creative, but it's an idea that brings with it some things i'm not sure i like: it takes most of the production out off my hands and puts me much more in the role of marketer than maker. also, it's risky from a business perspective, which i don't mind except that it is risky financially and i'm in no position to take financial risks. creative risks, yes. financial ones, not so much. i don't have much cash to lay out and whatever cash i do lay out i pretty much need to come back to me in one piece. and relatively soon. i'm no tycoon.

there are other ways to focus what i do. i really like working with my wedding clients, for example, and i could choose to focus on weddings. doing nothing but weddings would let me focus my energy better and would allow me to be more creative about how i design and create wedding stationery. it would let me work with clients on custom projects, which always pushes me as a designer and which helps me push the boundaries of my comfort zone. but working on wedding designs takes a lot of time. i'm hoping to recover a little bit of time for my life, to make my business a little bit more self-sustaining. weddings are decidedly not the way to do that.

and so i spin. and spin and spin. i bat that spider around like it's my brain's personal plaything.

spider number two is personal, and while i'm often quite personal on this blog (i mean, hello, i blogged my way through the very worst of my postpartum depression thank you), it's personal in a way that i don't like to be personal here, because it's something that i don't like to obsess over in life or in the interwebs (and obsess i definitely can if i allow myself to). but i'm going so crazy from it that i think i just need to share it and get it out of the way.

spider number two is about this baby weight. and how it's still here. and how i can't decide how i want to feel about that and how i want to react to it.

with evan, i gained a normal amount of weight: 28 pounds. without altering my life, that weight had more or less all come off within the first six months postpartum (and whatever remained i lost when anxiety ate my brain and filled my stomach too full for food, but that's another story). i remember loving it that practically every day i could see a difference. i was back in my old clothes in no time. one week after evan was born i put away all of my maternity clothes.

this time, i gained only slightly more: 31 pounds. by 4 weeks postpartum i had lost about half that, but here i am ay 4 months and i have made exactly zero progress. i recently made a somewhat concerted and yet still very laissez-faire effort to lose a few more pounds, during which time i lost (and gained) exactly zero pounds.

i do not believe in diets or diet food. i spent my late teens and early twenties memorizing the calorie content of every food in existence and then i spent my late twenties trying very very hard to forget all that. i believe in moderation and balance and just living a healthy life. i hate watching people torture themselves about food or obsess over exercise. i don't want to count or track or journal, even though i know those things to be effective measures for motivating progress, even (and maybe especially) for me. but then again i've never, in my life, had 15 pounds to lose.

and yeah, yeah, i know. fifteen schmiffteen. i'm still at a relatively healthy weight. my BMI is still (barely) within the "normal" or "healthy" range or whatever. i feel guilty even complaining about fifteen pounds. but i don't feel good about myself. i can't wear any of my own (favorite!) clothes. i'm not the healthy version of me that i want to be.

the spider that creeps through my catlike brain is this: i'm torn between (a) wanting to be very accepting of the changes that have taken place in my life and my body and wanting to just be patient and believe that living a healthy life each day will lead to a healthy body, even if that body is a size or two bigger than the body i used to walk around in, or even if it takes a while for it to settle into its new normal size, and (b) wanting to be okay with the fact that i just don't feel good about this body and that it does't have to make me a capital O-obsessive person if i decide that i want to actually set out to lose some weight by taking some kind of specific action (oh, what kind of action is a spider in and of itself, another little conundrum that my brain is just batting away at - would i want to meet with a nutritionist? join a gym we can't afford and don't have time to drive to, join weight watchers (online or in real life?), train for a marathon? i just. don't. know.)

i just know how my brain works, and i know that i am going to be paralyzed until i can just make a damned decision on both of these issues and move forward already. but in the meantime i'm paralyzed by the very decisions themsevles. i'm sitting here in the backyard, still in my pajamas at practically-noon, writing a ridiculous blog post while my family is out running errands because i just can't decide what to do next.

and oh my god i swear there is now a very fast, very large spider heading in my general direction and i think i'm going to have to get up and move. is that poetry or what? if only it were poetry with answers. damnit.