I've been converted

Last week Mr. A and I were at the local big orange do-it-yourself home-and-garden store, and as we were leaving – all loaded down with half a ton of potting soil, plants, tools, bags of mesquite chunks for the barbecue (one sale, two for one) and other assorted yard-related stuff – he pointed out a couple of prefabricated sheds that were parked up against the side of the building, in the shade.

"It's hot out here," he said. "Why don't you stay here and look at these sheds and I'll go get the car?"

It was hot, and I knew he'd been wanting one of those sheds – I figured he wanted me to examine the construction so that I would be adequately prepared to discuss it later, when we would weigh the pros and cons of getting one for the house.

So I stayed. Even though my first instinct was "forget it." For as long as I can remember I've pretty much hated the shape of the roofline of the classic "red barn" type of building – especially when it's used for very small buildings, like the one in this picture. Something about it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's the proportion that bugs me – in comparison to the size of the building itself this kind of roof seems bloated and deformed, instead of simple and straightforward, the way a roof is supposed to be. Maybe it seems presumptuous to use four lines to make a roof, instead of the plainer, more modest two. Or maybe I just instinctively find it ugly. Who knows why?

Anyway, what happened is that I walked into the biggest one they had to see how it looked from the inside – and instantly fell madly in love with it. It was a plain, rough-finished, not especially well-constructed 10x12' demonstration building – the same size as the building I've been plotting in my head for several years now, always afraid to actually make the commitment to materials and labor until I'm SURE I have the design absolutely perfect – but this one was the tall version, with 8' walls, instead of the usual 6' – and inside it had a loft that went all the way around three sides, almost like a second story.

Standing in that shed I finally realized the genius of the weird, rounded roofline: It opens up the whole inside of the building, so that you can actually use the space up under the roof. Suddenly I was envisioning a curtained sleeping area, a little walkway lined with shelves and books, a reading area with cushions and lamps and a little chest table for flowers and tea things ... and that was just one of the levels. The ground level was still huge – big enough for a whole small room's worth of art space, work space, dance space, yoga space, PMS/menstrual hut space, miniature wood stove space ....

In other words, instead of being just one little room that would have to contain everything I ever wanted to do, be or feel in my imaginary hut, I was suddenly able to picture a space that was also – a space. Empty and full, both at the same time.

I keep looking out the window now at the place I've decided to build it, and I think it's going to work. Slowly, I'm still amassing materials – the giant hardwood French doors I bought two summers ago are leaning against the back of the house, there are two or three farm loads of lumber back by the wood pile – at least some of it will be usable – and a few weeks ago at a yard sale I bought a set of barn door sliders for a ridiculously low price. These I had been wanting to use instead of trying to hang the doors on hinges, even before I opened my mind to the possibility of a building that actually looks like a barn – and maybe having them available, good as new in their white cardboard box, was part of what made it possible for me to consider a design I hadn't even thought about seriously enough to reject.

This is what those sliders look like, if you don't already know what I'm talking about. My plan is not to use them to slide covers over the French doors, like in this picture, but to actually attach the sliders to the French doors. The ones I got are the plain galvanized ones – not fancy black round ones like these ... and now, hmm, looking at this picture I'm thinking – maybe instead of the barn roof, I could just build the walls themselves up higher, so they go straight up a few feet on the second level before coming to a regular triangular pitch. It would definitely make it feel more like a little house on the inside, rather than a cozy little barn loft ....

Mr. A thinks that would look weird, and maybe it would. Although the shape is not totally unprecedented – there are lots of older houses in this valley that still have old wooden water tower stands in the back, that have been turned into little buildings. I'll have to think about it, and maybe build a model first, just to see. For right now I mainly just want to sit with the idea of this barn-shaped roof and see how I feel about it after a little time has passed.

At some point, if the building is ever going to actually be built, I will need to stop assessing options and make a decision and start building. I do have a pretty strong tendency to "dwell in possibility," as the t-shirt says ... not necessarily always in a good way. This project does seem to be continuously creeping forward, though. And I am enjoying the process.

Summer uniform foiled

I guess it had to happen eventually. The summer uniform I've been wearing for most of the last two summers and was planning to recycle this year with only minimal changes – has suddenly been adopted by some semi-official voice of fashion, which has pronounced 2009 the "summer of the shift." Drat!

It's such a basic dress, and that should've been my tip-off. Everything in design seems to be going basic right now. Just look at the new Pepsi logo if you don't believe me – and then spend an hour or two watching television. Snapple, too (is that a Pepsi brand? Wonder who got that account?)! I defy you to not find at least one major corporate logo that's undergone radical simplification over the last six months to a year. It's becoming chronic!

And now these dresses are everywhere! I keep seeing all these pictures of models wearing expensive and suddenly stylish versions of my formerly proprietary standard summer uniform – a plain linen shift over pants or leggings or shorts, with sandals and possibly some kind of hat or sweater or wrap – and it's causing me all kinds of angst. Because god forbid people might see me wearing the same old thing I always wear, and think I'm wearing it because I'm trying (and yet still somehow failing) to be fashionable? And then, if I keep wearing it after it goes back out of fashion, I'll be seen as behind the times. Instead of transcendent of them, which my silly vainglorious ego seems to think is the best way to be thought of by others, if they really must think of me at all ....

I can only write this because I know from reading my statistics that my regular readership has now descended into the very low single-digits. So I'm not really revealing the extent of my shallowness and self-consciousness to anyone who doesn't already know about it first hand.

(It does make me sad, though – just as an aside – to remember that I lost an old good friend over my unwillingness to censor myself on this blog. Or so he said. And so few people actually ever even read it!)

I've decided not to abandon my uniform though, and instead use this as an opportunity to challenge myself. I've always said the uniform was about keeping my life simple and stress-free, and about pleasing myself by wearing what I like, instead of trying to keep up with what I think other people think I should like.

If that's really true, then what do I care if everyone else is wearing the same thing this year? They'll soon get tired of it, and move on to something else, leaving me to continue wearing it until I get tired of it too.

In a way, now that I think of it, I'm starting to kind of like the idea that tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of other people will be wearing this exact outfit, and that there's absolutely nothing special about it. It's another one of the primary functions of a good uniform, that it allows me to blend. Because sometimes I enjoy being more expressive but most of the time I just want to go about my business without attracting undue attention.

And anyway, it's really not like I invented it myself. My original inspiration came from the way poor men dress in hot places like India, those long lose white shirts over long loose white pants. Use your clothes as a sort of portable, personal shade structure.

All this by way of announcing that it's finally getting hot around here – really hot now, moving toward the 90s – and I've officially broken out the loose summer layers.

Just to be clear

I failed to note in yesterday's rant that I actually love to ATTEND weddings. I love community rituals of all kinds, especially when they're about something important like a major life change or rite of passage. And as for parties, a wedding is pretty much my favorite kind. Just don't ask me to stand in the spotlight ... I don't like it there.

Never wanted a wedding

I've just spent the last 9 hours looking at hundreds of wedding pictures for an upcoming work project and I just have to say: I'm so glad I never had a real wedding! It all looks so exhausting ... trying to get everything just perfect ... and all that money ... I have a work friend who plans events and the word from her is that the minimum budget for a wedding is $50 grand. That's her MINIMUM, to even consider taking on the project. Most of her clients have a budget of $75K and up. For a few hours of wedding events! Who are these people?

The photos, I will say, are almost universally gorgeous. Maybe it would be worth the down payment on a house to have at least one or two photos of myself that don't make me look like a frumpy rumpled troll. Or maybe they just didn't submit the ones of unphotogenic brides.

A couple of photographers are really standing out in this group, too. I love seeing how each one has a distinct eye – not just their style or technical acumen, but their instinct for what makes a good photo. A couple really stand out as photojournalists – every image looks like it was shot for a newspaper. One fine art photographer (who also happens to be an acquaintance and occasional colleague of mine), with her stuff, almost every shot is like what you'd expect to see in an expensive coffee table book. Her sense of color, light and mood is spot-on in every single picture.

As the person who has to put it all together for print, it makes me very happy to have such an abundance of really good photographs, for a change. I found out in a meeting this afternoon that I'm going to have to scrap my last two weeks of work and start over with all new layouts for this section, but because the changes mean I finally have some decent material to work with, I'm actually pretty happy about it. Even though it also means I'm going to be working insane hours for the next couple of weeks to get everything done, and redone.

As for the idea of a wedding itself ... it's just never been my fantasy to have that one "very special day." I can't even begin to imagine voluntarily putting myself in the spotlight the way the folks in these photos are doing, even if it's only my good friends and family who are looking. That's why I eloped the first time I got married – so I wouldn't have to deal with anyone looking at me. The party we had a few weeks later was simple and fun and low-key and well under $50K. It helps with the budget when nobody expects to be served alcohol.

Anyway. I think sometimes about BEING married again, or more accurately, about being able to access certain financial benefits that are available only to officially married people – but having an actual wedding, I don't ever think about that. Except right now, looking at all these pictures.

Everybody looks so happy, and that's sweet to see. Even though you know it's still just one day out of a life that's full of all the usual stuff that everyone's life contains. I have a long history of finding myself in the middle of such events, where everyone is supposed to be having such a wonderful, magical time-out-of-mind – and checking in with myself emotionally only to find that I don't really feel much different than I usually do when nothing in particular is going on. I do know how it is to feel swept away by the kind of joy I think people want to feel at a wedding – but when it happens to me it's almost never because of any particular event, but more just as a natural condition of being .... waking up in the morning, or riding my bike. It's rare (though not unprecedented) that a long planned for spectacular event actually lives up to my expectations ....

But then, maybe that's why people have weddings in the first place. Life is so often disappointing. Maybe it's something we need, every once in awhile – to enter a situation where we're encouraged to go ahead and reach for the hope of feeling something more intensely joyous than the usual. I have to admit the people in the photos do look pretty happy.

On the other hand, maybe it's just the wine .... Plenty of wine flowing around here.

I definitely need to have a party pretty soon. Invite a few people over to cook, at the very least.

Sigh. Enough pondering and pontificating. Back to work.

Salamander

Last night I went out to take the trash out to the road and there was a huge salamander walking across the porch. Not as huge as those big orange ones from China, but still the biggest one I've ever seen in person – about 6 or 7 inches long.

I looked it up online (photo to come) and am pretty sure it's an arboreal salamander. It's an amphibian adapted for climbing (see also: arboreal locomotion), it's born fully formed (no larval stage) and it has no lungs – all of its respiration takes place directly through its skin.

I've been thinking all day about what it might feel like to be that open and porous – to have the world moving in and out of me not just through the clearly defined passageway of nose – throat – lungs – blood, but all over my entire body.

No wonder they're such sensitive creatures.

Having such a large one living in my yard makes me feel good about the safe habitat we've created. It's mostly Mr. A's doing –  he's deeply dedicated to the protection of shy creatures, as he calls them. We have little islands every few feet or so throughout the yard, which appear to the untrained eye to be nothing more than piles of yard waste and debris, but which are actually strategically placed to help lizards and toads move around their environment without being overly exposed to danger from above.

He also maintains bird watering stations every 25-50 feet or so, designed to overflow and water the plants beneath, so there's always damp cover available.

Anyway. Thinking about breathing through the skin. I like that idea very much.

A dozen nickels

In the book I'm reading, a someone just gave a gift to a man living alone on an island in a lake in the far north: a bag of potatoes, a small block of lard, and a scrap of cloth tied up around 12 nickels.

I was thinking how good it would feel to give those things to someone you care about, and know that they would see it as a really great gift.

One of the paradoxical things about living in such an affluent society is that in a weird way it makes it harder to be truly generous. Most of the people I know are more or less in the same economic situation as me – we all seem to have so much already – so what can I give that is really useful or even needed? Giving to people who have much less than I do is sort of alienating in a way, if I don't know them personally – giving to organizations, for example, though I do that too – and if I do know them, it has the potential to become somehow embarrassing ... I don't want anyone to feel ashamed by being targeted by me as "needy."

How to share in a way that makes everyone feel richer, without incurring a sense of obligation that one person or another will feel burdened by having to repay? Or ashamed at being unable to repay?

Generosity is such a deep art, I think. I want to get better at it.

For as long as I can remember, almost every gift I've ever given or received has fallen more or less into the category of "nice to have" – even things like socks or pretty little jars of jam are still sort of extra, because I already have all the socks I need, and all the food I need.

I've always thought of this as a good thing. Of course it is! What would my life feel like if I really did not have a single pair of socks? How would a gift of socks seem different then?

Don't get me wrong, I love receiving gifts. But more than the thing itself, it just feels good to know someone cares about me, and is thinking about me.

In the book, the guy on the island wasn't starving, and he didn't really "need" the gifts he received. But he was living low enough on the food chain that they were meaningful and useful to him all the same. That seems like a good balance to strive for – all your needs are covered, but you're not so overwhelmed with excess that an unexpected gift ends up feeling more like a burden than a blessing.

The idea of sharing comes to mind. When people have more, do they share more? Or do they have more because they share less? When you have less, do things become more important? Or less important? Maybe when you live with less, you realize how little you really need, and it becomes easier to let things go. I read somewhere recently that once people's basic needs have been met, more money doesn't necessarily translate into more happiness – there are just as many happy poor people as happy rich people, and just as many unhappy people in each category.

Maybe I'm just in spring cleaning mode. Wanting to clear out the clutter and make more space for the air to move through.

A little stack of nickels really is such a beautiful thing.