modern life--the innocence principle

 Speaking of innocence...meet my baby niece Harlow

I have the bad habit of holding posts in my head until they die a slow and terrible death there.  Like all writers and bloggers I'm sure, I imagine I have to sit down for three hours and craft a perfectly-articulated thing so that it's certain never to be written.  It's the main reason this blog has been such a ghost town for the past year, and so I'd like to focus a little more on getting things out, even if rough and imperfect in form.

So before I forget, I wanted to share this idea I've had rolling around in my skull bones since before the holidays.  It's a perspective thing.  The idea of choosing to view others with the "presumption of innocence."  You see, I was at Trader Joe's just before Christmas.  I could stop here and you already know what I'm going to say.  It was the grocery version of that show Wipeout where people move through an obstacle course of hazards and eventually land in the water with a broken back.

On this particular night everyone seemed so impolite, self-absorbed, and even aggressive.  I was cut off in the parking lot, almost back into by people pulling out willy-nilly, someone nearly ran me down as I tried to cross over to the store, and a woman turned her cart sideways in an aisle so no one could get by.  Then, on the way home I was nearly killed by someone running a red light.

I drove home with shattered nerves, feeling like the whole of humanity had gone mad.  And then I stopped and a thought occurred to me: What if each person I had felt so antagonized by was entirely innocent of the crimes I held against them?  What if they hadn't even seen me?  Meant me absolutely no harm?  Were guilty of nothing more than being over-stressed and in a hurry?  Just like me.  Maybe I had even engaged in some of that behavior without knowing!

This isn't to say that people aren't sometimes badly behaved or lacking in good manners....but it feels vastly better to realize there is an absence of intentional malice in what they're doing.  That they're not out to get us.  It's not personal.

And then I thought a little further.  This "presumption of innocence" principle helped me to stop feeling bad about others, but was there a way I could begin to feel good about them?

Well, we often speak of "the human family," but what if I really tried to see it that way?  So I engaged in a little exercise.  
 
For instance, I thought what if the guy that almost ran me down in the parking lot was my Uncle Larry?  Would I have felt the same way?  Called him terrible names under my breath? Hardly. Knowing who he was, I would have known that he hadn't seen me and would never mean anyone harm.  I would have laughed to myself and then told him at the next family dinner that he should install a cattle guard on the front of his car.

And what about the older woman that blocked the aisle completely with her cart and took her own sweet time selecting her tomato sauce?  I replaced her with the image of my own grandmother doing the same thing (and I'm sure she does!), and suddenly I felt overwhelming affection towards her.  As my grandmother goes about her daily life I don't want those she meets to react angrily and impatiently towards her, so why should I do it to someone else's grandmother?  The world moves so fast and is so unkind to those who are slower.  This woman probably didn't even know her cart was sideways or that she was taking "too long".  And the twisted, almost mean look on her face?  Years of arthritis pain maybe, but not the sure evidence of a nasty disposition as I first imagined.

The guy that ran the red light became my cousin Ryan, or my husband, or one of my sons (driving in the future).   Wonderful, wonderful people who happened to misjudge the yellow light or were late for work or who simply needed to drive more carefully.

I wanted to share this because I can't tell you how much it improved my outlook.  I often forget and the angry old feelings well up in me.  On Saturday someone wouldn't let me merge onto the freeway and I almost ended up on the shoulder.  Oh, the things I called him until I said to myself, "He didn't even see you" and then imagined he was my father-in-law (it really helps if the person loosely resembles some relative!)  A smile spread across my face and my body relaxed.  I kid you not, you can actually feel your brain chemistry change as you do this.

This world has real problems, friends, and the "innocence principle" isn't going to fix them.  But it does give you back some control over how you experience the world.  And it allows you to respond to others in a way you can feel good about.  And that's not nothing.    

          
   

DWELL HOME TOUR 2012, SAN DIEGO MODERNISM GETS REAL

Complaints that San Diego isn't innovating are now completely unfounded, so it looks like we will have to find other things to complain about (78 degrees again?!  Perfect weather is so boring, so non-life threatening, so lacking the excitement of destructive super storms!)

Exhibit A:  Dwell held a modern home tour weekend here recently.  
Exhibit B:  North Park was just named the 13th hippest city in the country (by Forbes magazine using complicated food truck per capita ratios and a dictionary definition of "hip", but still...)

We are now on the map as more than "that place between Los Angeles and Mexico where you once stopped for fish tacos".  Yay, San Diego!

Three things you should know about really modern folks:  They can afford bigger windows than you, they have generally mind-blowing views of the ocean, and they don't particularly want strangers using their bathrooms.  O.K.  Fair enough.  

Here is a super-secret modern location.

This deconstructed light fixture blows your mind.

Chances are, if your roof looks like this it's completely by accident and you should look into your moisture problem immediately. 

I know it's wrong to do this to people, but if this is wrong I don't want to be right.  She's an angel (you know her as House of Habit).

If you don't plant this grass at your modern pad, it's like you know nothing about modernism.  So don't look like a dummy.  Just plant it. 

I think this was art and you couldn't really sit on them.  Sadly there's not a lot of art you can sit on.

These guys were taking photos for their Match.com profiles.  "Me and my buddies at the weekend house.  I'd love to enjoy it with you.  Call now!  Full head of hair!"

This place was the greatest because, to me, "modern" doesn't just come from one decade. 

Dusty of Rael Wood launches his Dwell modeling career.

No.  It's a wide-angle lens problem.  Not a new design.

Bass Magazine pin-ups are salacious.

Thanks to Dwell for hosting the Chambray Gang, a loose collaborative of blogging creatives who show up to events dressed alike.  We're also available for Bar Mitzvahs and basically any event with finger foods and goodie bags. 

A special, hot wing sauce-covered thanks to Julia at The Post Social and San Diego Songbird for making the Chambray Gang possible, and to Morgan for legitimizing our status as members of the press!

ANTHEM

Every season I seem to pick an anthem song.  Something that reflects the weather, the feeling, and the mood of the months.

Two summers ago it was Miike Snow's "Animal," and now every time I hear that rad opening riff, I am instantly back in my car packed with boys and surfboards, cruising La Jolla Shores.

Late last night I heard this song for the first time.  It was a "sit in the car, turn off the lights, close your eyes" kind of song.  And I knew it would be my autumn anthem.  I hope you like it.

Ben Howard "Old Pine"

PINK

I'm working on a little design project for my sister in law.  For some reason in real life and on this blog I'm always very careful not to portray myself as a designer.  It seems uppity?  Presumptuous?  I actually studied Interior Design/Art History in college for several semesters before switching over to what I felt was a more "cerebral" field.

But you know what?  I always come back to design.  I love it.  I do it for fun.  I would do it for free.  I AM doing it for free.  And I would probably even do it for you FOR FREE right now, just for the joy of seeing a room transformed.  It's kind of a rush.  Email me if you'd like at modernhaus@gmail.com.

So this little project I'm working on is basically a zero-budget makeover, which is pretty much my forté. Paint, an $80 dresser from Craigslist, some vintage thrifted accessories, and these DIY dip dyed, faintly ombré drapes:

They are shown here in my dining room,  not their final destination.  My SIL is young, had requested a beachy vibe, and the room needed a lot of brightening up, so I decided on a totally-out-of-character shade of coral-pink.  And you know what?  I'm super into it now.

The dye color was actually "tulip red."  In my first attempt at dip-dyeing, I found that the dye color needs to be much darker than the color you want to end up with.  So although this had a dark red-fuschia-orange tone in the dye bath, once rinsed the color was more subtle and painterly.

Here you can see how intense the color was before I rinsed and dried the panels.

And if you missed it, here is my first attempt at dip dyeing.  Get the tutorial here!

{After I had worked out how to enlarge photos from Instagram, they went and changed the format.  Maybe to prevent publishing?  I don't know.  I'm working on it and will get these enlarged soon!}
  

THIS IS LOVE

This past week as we shopped for a Navajo bracelet, my husband explained to me that turquoise is usually filled with stabilizer.  Of course my first thought was that I wanted an original, unadulterated stone.  Cracks and flaws and all.
But I have to accept the true nature of turquoise; that it's beautiful but prone to cracking.  Without stabilizer, maybe it would crumble and be lost.  My mom had some like that.  It disintegrated into beautiful dust, so fine and blue.

Family, if you are lucky enough to have it (and if you're not, then friends are a good substitute), is the spackle that holds the crack-and-crumble prone institution of marriage together.  The filler, the binder. The stone itself is beautiful.  Precious.  But fragile.  And where the cracks form, the binder fills and smooths over and makes whole again.  Maybe not perfect.  Not original.  But sturdier.
It's important not to mistake the binder for the stone, though.  Glue is no substitute for precious stone.

This is what I was thinking as, one day this week, members of both our families converged in Virginia City.  In the blistering, funky Western streets of a ghost town in the mining hills of Nevada we all merged into a giant, amoebic, wild family.  You bought the ice cream of whoever was in line with you. Shepherded with two arms a gaggle of strollers and boys, accidentally pulling in peripheral children who seemed disappointed when plucked out of our happy mob by their lone parent.  Nephews of one family and second cousins of another were just cousins. joined by being of the same height and a strange and strong, instantly recognizable thread of family belonging. A bloodless cord.

Like cells, pieces broke off, joined members across the street, and then rejoined having grown in size; having gained an ice cream cone or a bow and arrow play set.
I set the toddler of my cousin on the back of my tree-like oldest son and he accepted the burden naturally, gracefully. Maybe even thankfully.

Later she ran ahead to walk with me and take my hand, saying, "I just want to be with you." At first I wasn't sure I had heard right.

When my oldest graduated from middle school, this enthusiastic mob showed up.  The older girl-cousins had glittery hand-made signs.  Great grandmas whispered conspiratorially.  The little cousins were held up on shoulders to see.  And when his name was called, our cheers were deafening and prolonged.

My son said later that his friends had asked, wasn't that embarrassing?
What did you say, I wanted to know.
I said that's not embarrassing, that's my family, he told me.

I went to see the foreign film I Am Love a while back.  As we left, a woman who was writing a book approached theatre-goers and asked them, what is love?

When she asked me, I answered immediately, "Showing up."

Showing up, and maybe screaming with all your heart.

It Used to be Easy to be Cool

until the internet ruined it.

A golden-haired girl and I, we have a little joke about blogging.  We were riffing on the idea that if you were young and lovely, recently employed at a well-known magazine, lived in New York and owned an Apple computer in 2002, creating a popular blog was ridiculously straightforward.

We made up a hypothetical blog post from this quaint era, and it goes something like this:

"Food-have you heard of it? I discovered it in Brooklyn this weekend!  Do you think you would try food?  Discuss!"

Fast-forward to today and every blogger is an HTML-writing, photoshopping, link embedding, monetizing, branding, logo-designing, networking, non-gluten-eating, nasty green drink-making, tomato-growing, live edge coffee table-owning mo-chine.  Even the newest and most obscure of blogs makes the online presence of major corporations look prehistoric.

To prove how easy blogging used to be, I just came up with six vintage-style blog posts in six seconds!  It was that easy.

2004- "Amy Butler fabric-I want to buy some and make pillows!  Which Amy Butler fabric do you like best?"

2005- "Design Sponge-I discovered it yesterday!  Have you heard of it?  Copy and paste this URL until I Google instructions for creating live links!"

2006- "Bunting-You can hang it over your bed OR your sofa!  Do you have bunting?  You don't?  Why not?"

2007- "I saw a girl on a bike with braids in Brooklyn this weekend!"

2008- "I went to the best wedding this weekend!  The amazing bride and groom used giant balloons and mustaches on a stick in their photos!"

2009- "I discovered that you can drink out of Mason jars!  Would you drink out of a Mason jar?  Here is a link to the instruction on how to drink from a Mason jar!"

I bet you can think of many more!  But now I'm tired, because creating a modern blogpost takes so much energy.  Some day our robotic body-doubles will do it for us, or maybe we will outsource it to India.  The future of blogging is anyone's guess.  I just don't know what I'm going to do with all this unused bunting...

The future of blogging, footwear, Ermie, and a lamp DIY

I highly recommend having paper on your nightstand.  Personally, I have an IKEA shopping list/showroom map with a lot of Swedish-chef product names written on it,  and a broken pencil.  It's what the famous authors are doing.  Anyhow, it's necessary to write down those barely-lucid thoughts that occur just as your mind is losing its grip on reality and sliding into dreamtimes.  Because ideas that are anchored to reality are pretty much useless.

This is how I came upon my brilliant idea of a blogger-to-blogger, design-oriented vacation/home exchange!  And now look!  I'm rich and famous!  If only I could design a website and do the PR work while slipping into my nightly cheese-and-Seinfeld-rerun coma.  *SIGH*

So anyhow, I was having some free association time in bed the other night.  Been thinking a lot lately about blogging and social media.  How fast things move and change.  How challenging it can be to know in which media format to invest one's energy.  How plugged in one has to be, but also disciplined and mindful about knowing when to shut it down; when to forge "real world" partnerships and networks.

It's no secret that I desperately heart Instagram.  I'm quite prolific there, friends.  My handle is modernhaus.

So my thought was this:

Instagram is the cool friend who knows the chef at the hot new restaurant.  Blogger is the friend that knows the hostess at the Olive Garden.

This is not, by any means, in reference to YOUR blogs, guys.  In the light of day I think my brain just meant to say that Instagram seems more dynamic, immediate, energetic, experimental, and fresh.

What do you think?  Are your social media habits changing?  Are you more or less interested in blogs than you were a year ago?

Last week I attended a Nutella binge/epic business discussion on the subject with Jon, Morgan, and Laure.  Consensus seemed to be that managing social media is a little like holding on to the tail of a tiger, except for Jon who controls the internet with his mind.


Unrelated, but possibly related because I saw these via social media, are Freda Salvador shoes.

Sexy-orthopedic-handmade.  Freda Salvador, you can use that on your website if you like!

via

I want the ones on the left, to go with my imaginary Ermie dress.

photo by Kate Miss and via

And finally, the creative bender continues.  I know.  My days are filled with paint fumes, blisters, and sunburns.  I wake up covered in bruises and miscellaneous paint colors and I do it all over again!

Yesterday's victims were a couple of antique lamps:

And then anything I could get my hands on.

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