All my life I've been searching for a pat on the back. Recognition for the fact
that at times I've busted my backside and far surpassed the capabilities of
some. I'm not asking for an ego boost, I'm not wanting a display of vanity. I
just want someone to notice, and say, Hey, that's amazing, let's write this up.
It probably doesn't matter in the scheme of things, and it only bothers me when
I see other people getting patted on the back who have accomplished far less.
That's a comparison trap that I try not to get into, but it doesn't lessen the
desire for acknowledgement. When I was a junior in high school, I entered a
national architecture competition. My art teacher sponsored me, and coming from
a small school, I fumbled through the presentation boards, the drafting and
floorplans, until I felt like it was "good enough". We sent it in and forgot
about it. Sometime later, the school secretary called me down to the office over
the loud speaker. My art teacher, Mrs. Kane, was standing there, beaming. "YOU
WON!" My resonse, "Won what?". I couldn't even remember that I had entered. In
the end, it was one of a few rare acknowledgements from a source larger than my
parents, teachers, and supportive friends. The small school didn't have room for
much in the way of programs for the arts; my senior year I went to my best
friend's Sports Award Program and watched her recieve countless decorations for
her tennis, volleyball and basketball efforts. I swear, they would have awarded
her MVP for the football team, had she worn one of the guys uniforms. I'm
grateful that she understood why I felt so underrated, so misunderstood. I got a
small trophy in an overcrowded ceremony for brilliantly performing the snotty
girl in the school play. In college, my gradepoint kept me from entering the
competitions I was so qualified to win for the school. An effort to understand
the business side of design, as opposed to coasting through a few art classes,
left me with enough C's and D's to always eliminate my chances of going to final
rounds. A fabulous internship didn't do anything but convince a few job
interviewers to listen to me after reading my resume. I guess personality was
working against me. After a trying year in Dallas, I moved back in with my
parents, and blindly decided to start this company. The business classes didn't
pay off when I tried to apply them; real life is quite different than the text
books. I had no money (and I mean NO money--my checking account was almost
negative), when I went to do my first run of printing. After that, it was a
rough road of trial and error, and I know I'm not at the end of it. Two years
and $120,000 in sales later, I'm still not sure if it's going to work. The
cashflow is hurting me big time right now; top that with a big dose of
discouragement and the lack of energy I feel from all the late nights I'm afraid
will keep me from moving forward. But I get up every day. I get in here, I pay
my bills, ON TIME. I pay my reps, ON TIME. I try to scrape together dollars for
advertising, showroom fees, travel expenses. I paid for New York in cash.
$12,000 smackers, right out of ye olde bank account. In the end, I know it's not
the pats on the back that matter. God has brought me to this point, and I know
I'm supposed to trust him to take me even further. In the end, the pat on the
back should be His, not mine. Right now, it's hard. I feel like crying because I
can't afford to finish the house, I want to go shopping, I need to pay a ticket
in Irving, Texas that I got in January. Part of it is just being sick today,
plain exhausted. I guess the vacation will be good. My mom, completely unaward
of my discouragement, handed me this piece of paper when I ran by my parents' to
get some medicine: * After Fred Astaire's first screen test, a 1933 memo from
the MGM testing director said, "Can't act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little."
Astaire kept that memo over the fireplace in his Beverly Hills home. * Walt
Disney was fired by a newspaper for lacking ideas. He also went bankrupt several
times before he built Disneyland. * Most of the important things in the world
have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be
no hope at all. If I can be any encouragement at all to anyone else in my shoes,
let me remind you to not give up. I’ve sold $120,000 over the past two years
out of literally nothing. Just bitty payments here and there, when I could,
supported by the generous people who knew I would keep working to pay them back.
The pat on the back will come someday, and I hope someone reminds me then to
give credit to friends and family, glory to God, and not take any credit of my
own. It hasn’t been me.
June 2004 Archives
The first being that I am sick. Sick the bad way. Fever, chills, stuff running
down the back of my throat, achy muscles, sore throat. It sucks. It also sucks
that I have to go clean out the trunk of my car. It's full of boxes and crap
that just needs to be thrown away. The achey muscles aren't looking forward to
it, but I think there is a Quickbooks manual buried somewhere in there. Drew and
I are leaving for a week in Chicago early tomorrow morning. I'm hoping I can
curl up in piles of blankets and pass out.
I have a theory about beautiful houses. Offices can be messy; that's why you
have offices. But houses--houses should boast of comfort and familiar
collections and memories and, well, beauty. This morning I laid in bed, on piles
of pillows, whilst Amanda did books up at the office. Don't get mad; I was
working. I've a great plan to intro a TON of new art in January and that means
I've got to get a-sketching. I've done 48 this week; this morning I did even
more. It wasn't the hard chore I was dreading when I got started, and I
discovered that if I sketched in bed with sunlight streaming in, it made the
morning and the sketching both immensely more pleasant. You'll find it
interesting to note that I did not have a cup of coffee at this idealic scene.
The coffee maker is still in my parents garage, along with the kitchenaid
blender, awaiting to be dug out when I finally have new countertops. This state
of affairs leads me to my next point: My House is Messy. The appropriate
Solution for a Messy House is this: an Ugly Drawer. The Ugly Drawer is the one
place in the house where Ugly Things are allowed to go, and stay. Ugly Things
include bills, old unsharpened pencils, twisty ties, crumbs and dust bunnies,
random paperclips, receipts, miscellany crap. The one rule of the Ugly Drawer is
that it is not allowed to overflow into any other drawers, and that it must be
able to close. Therefore, a general cleaning-out of the Ugly Drawer is mandatory
ever so often. I have no ugly drawer. I have a lovely French-shaped porcelain
platter that sits on a ledge that has collected Ugly Things since January. It is
time for the platter to be pretty, and this means, an Ugly Drawer must be
located, purchased and used. I spent the lunch hour scouring local antique
places for a standard, three-drawer dresser, that I could place in the hall and
put a mirror over and use the top drawer for Ugly Things. Couldn't find one I
like. No doubt this means I'll have to look harder, and pay more. But you've got
to have an Ugly Drawer.
What a day. I need people to freakin pay me. I'm a one man show, here, folks!
Nobody else is willing to foot my house payment for me, ok? I'd appreciate some
prompt and timely payment! Sorry, had to vent. I know it nobody's fault that's
reading this. It's more or less the store owners who I wish would just PAY ME!
My fabulous new bookeeper, Amanda, tells me not to worry about it, that it'll be
ok. She's a little bit more confident in these people than I am. All I know is
that we're halfway through the month, the bank account is in the red, and
getting redder, and I've still not paid my house payment and in 15 days I have
to start over again. And the money in recievables, should I recieve it, would
more than cover it. Not encouraging. I know I said I wouldn't blog about work,
but frankly, unless you're interested in the color of my t-shirt from day to
day, there's not much else to blog. I know I'm supposed to have faith in these
things, but today, it's hard. How on earth is this all supposed to shake down?
I'm really really really worried that I won't get paid at all for some of this
stuff. And that by the time I do get paid on it, I'll be so up to my ears in
bloody finance charges from the bank that I won't have any profit left after I
pay commissions. Bloody hell.
Nothing beats great music. Absolutely nothing. Being able to kick back, pull out
a paint brush, relax and just let it all flow. The words, the art, the sounds,
the music...everything. I live for peaceful moments when the world seems to melt
away and just leave me and my canvas. Responsibility has got to set in sometime
very soon, though. My head is so in a cloud right now, trying to get stuff done
that is just so frustrating and almost impossible to rush. Sucks. How was Bleu
Edmondson Saturday night?
My mom, dad, Drew and I put 110% effort into the house last weekend. The living
room FINALLY got painted, the kitchen is halfway through the prep to painting;
today I had floor people come and quote putting down wood in the dining room and
refinishing the rest of the house. I really REALLY am going to have a party
there sometime this year. It's itching me something bad. Still left to do: paint
and hang the doors, wallpaper the bathroom, replace all the cabinet doors I sold
at my last garage sale for $1. No, not $1 each. One buck for all fifty two of
them.
In an effort to blog about work less, and overall try to party a little more,
I've decided that I'm officially no longer allowed to blog about work, unless
it's to vent about someone driving me crazy. When I finally figure out how to
work Dreamweaver, I'm going to put a news/blog page on the work website and blog
about boring work stuff there. Tonight I'm supposed to go out with Drew &
friends for drinks around 8. That gives me about 4 hours to crank out some stuff
here and get presentable-like looking. I just went to the card store next door
and got a GIANT double chocolate truffle--an extravagence that I do believe I
should indulge myself in more often. For a mere $2.12, I had to take 5 giant
bites out of the truffle just to swallow it. MMM, giant truffle, so good.
All this slut talk on all these blogs has got me thinking. I'd rather be a slut
than an unhappily committed woman. By unhappily committed woman, I mean to
include any of the following: 1. Any woman, engaged or married, who has a
physically and or verbally abusive husband. 2. Any woman, engaged or married,
who has a husband who decieves and or lies to her. 3. Any woman, engaged or
married, who has a husband who decieves and/or lies to her about other women. 4.
Any woman, engaged or married, who relies on a man for emotional support who
does not share the same reliance in return. 5. Any woman, engaged or married,
who has a husband who at any time has ever: slept with, kissed, fondled or
looked at another woman during the course of a committed relationship. 6. Any
woman, engaged or married, whose partner doesn't have the decency to respect her
or other women around him. By this, I infer to calling other people sluts. Over
the past year, I've run into several unhappily married women. Their husbands
don't work, at home, or at work, or for one reason or another, an emotional
barrier has risen in the relationship that neither party knows how to get rid
of. I've met women whose husbands are having affairs right under their noses.
I've met women who know about the affairs, and still think they are better off
than the girl he's screwing because they have a ring on their finger. I've met
women who are miserable because their husbands don't understand their needs, and
I've met men who aren't in love with their wives enough to even try
understanding their needs. In fact, the only happy marriage I've had much
contact with over the past year has been my parents. That's a rare case, in and
of itself. I asked my mom the other night if married people ever fell out of
love. Sounds like a five year old's question, but hey, I've never been married
and I don't know. I've been in a couple of frustrating dating situations, and I
was in love once with a guy who wasn't in love with me in the end, but I've
never been with anybody for over two years and awaken to their gross smelly
breath and not wanted to do anything but kick them out of bed. Which is what
married people say happens every now and then. My mom's answer was wise: you
have to not want to fall out of love. You have to work at staying in love. I
could make a case in point, but it would relate to my relationship with Drew,
and I don't think that would be fair to friends who have been in longer
relationships. All I can say is, if you're a guy who is sleeping with a slut,
then you're not much more than a man-whore yourself. If you're accusing someone
of being a slut, then you're probably all to familiar with the definition of a
slut. If you're not, you don't have any room to go calling people names. And if
at any point in time I've ever been a slut myself, I'm grateful for it. It's
those times in life that teach you what to steer clear of in the long run. It's
those guys who give in to sluts that you DON'T want. Kinda makes me think that
the good one's aren't all taken.
And only a short amount of it. Have ya'll heard of Guster? Drew got one of the
CD's at work and I've had it in the car all weekend. It's fabulous for
creative-painting-time. Check em out.
