I come home wanting to touch everyone

Just returned from Design Madison's monthly event. This one featured Vault49, a firm whose work you've seen. You know who founded Vault 49 (and who still does most of the work)? Two guys who met in London art college five years ago. They gave this awesome hour-long talk, punctuated with swigs of Amstel Light and delivered in delightful accents. And what they had to say about creativity and art and taking risks and working in a community of like-minded smart inspired people was just ... right.

It's the nerdiest (but highest) high isn't it? Those moments when you find yourself inspired by everything--a reflection in a puddle, the colors in a scarf someone's wearing, the way the kitchen smells hours after you cooked something. I'll never get over the sheer awesomeness of this feeling, when everything seems to be beckoning you to write, or design, or sketch something. I am sure that accountants and strategic marketing managers have their own brand of inspiration, perhaps by closing a big deal or making numbers add up, but I'm so glad that I'm excited by other things--velvet, shadows, a diner that hasn't changed decor since the Reagan administration and serves really excellent gingerbread pancakes.

I'm glad that I'm starting to acquire things and knowledge and stuff I like--not just a really great lamp, but also having found that lamp in the back of a Dig and Save on a bright Saturday morning, not just rereading an old favorite book but finding in it the receipt from its purchase or a random note I tucked inside three years ago, an admittedly not-awesome photograph that regardless captures everything I wanted to about the magnolias in April on Oxford Street--and finally, feeling like (most) everything I do or own seems to reflect who I am.

I have these exquisitely nerdy and self-reflective moments in which I imagine that my fifteen-year old self is standing in my apartment, watching me petting Truman, butterflying a tenderloin, listening to an awesome band thrust upon me by the B, e-mailing my friends a one-word e-mail ("poop"). I know that my past self would be (or is? it's fucking tough with the tenses here) so relieved, so impressed with who I (we?) turned out to be.

Insane? Probably. The ideas that I scratched onto a cocktail napkin during the session for new poems? Most likely are not going to turn into anything. The thought to try and sneak an empty pint glass into my purse? Fleeting--I'm all grown up now and shit. But it's enough that it's Thursday night, I'm feeling inspired, I spent the day listening to NPR podcasts and eating curry and researching recipe copyright law and wearing my Look at Me, I'm the Copywriter glasses and fending off compliments on the scarf AV knitted for me a few years back.

Life could be worse. Go find your velvet, your shadows, your diner. I'm done with the schmaltzy artist stuff.

(But how cool is it that we are artists? Let's make t-shirts!)