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For some reason, I fell out of music for a bit. Maybe it was the new baby that sucked all the oxygen out of the room. I would never classify myself as an aficianado, but I love finding new music. I don't need to rant about how awful FM radio is these days. It's a well known fact that a single wart-nosed gnome owns all the stations in all the cities and he is forcing his dream of only playing 4 songs an hour on us.

What reawakened my love? Internet radio, specifically KEXP.org which i used to listen to all day long as i clickety clicked my workday away. Now that i work in an office and share bandwidth with others, i've had to curtail my relationship with my radio DJ boyfriend, John In The Morning. *sigh*. He and Cheryl Waters bring an eclectic blend of indie pop, hip hop, punk and whatever piques their interest. As a completely ad-free, listener supported station, they don't need to bend to the whims of the top40 gods. Not a day goes buy that the station doesn't play something that surprises me. They've introduced me to more new music than anything else!

I tend to dig the indie pop, singer songwriter genres. My Faves these days?

1) Rogue Wave
2) The Be Good Tanyas
3) The Shins
4) Iron and wine w/ Calexico
5) Mike Doughty (former frontman for Soul Coughing)

These artists are all available on iTunes, and many other online outlets (or if you must, "record shops" :)

Want some free music? Check out 3hive, a blog that links you to free downloads provided by the artists themselves. download.com also provides lots of great, legitimately free music but they also have a great email newsletter that highlights folks you might never find on your own. It's kind of like getting a really great mix tape in your email box every two weeks!

What music is banging YOUR chimes these days?

What? you say? Yogurt with what amounts to pop rocks that you mix in yourself? No wonder kids are spastic. All the food companies are engineering their products to a) appeal to children and b) make them strung-out sugar addicts. There doesn't seem to be a breakfast food that hasn't been injected with icing. Fast food restaurants, in fear of class-action suits, offer fruit as an alternative to fries. While their motive isn't really altruistic, i don't care as long as they're providing healthy alternatives. Cereals and other grocery products purchased for children are getting worse and worse. Granola bars used to at least provide some grains and raisins. Now they're swirled with chocolate and laced with meth. I can imagine the children whining in the grocery aisles now... please? it's only got a little meth in it!

I'm an art director in an advertising agency. And it's a stoopid industry that I'm in. Don't get me wrong, my boss is wonderful and he's constructed a great place to work but you can't get away from the silliness of the industry. It's the falsest procedure for creativity that man could devise. Creativity, to me, is meaningful and planned but spontaneity is an integral component. In advertising and graphic design, everything is evaluated by 12,000 people and often the mail room guy has just as important say as the president.  God forbid you're doing work for another agency! Their entire agency evaluates it, then it's sent to their client who routes it to THEIR mail guy.

Sometimes the most random comment becomes law. And by the time the changes make their way to me, they've been interpreted and translated by folks that, although well-intentioned, have no creativity and very little, if any art education. Some times the client is so vague or pendantic that they beat the life out of the project and me. It's awfully hard to get fired up creatively. Make it blue. Make the logo bigger. SWEET JESUS, JUST LET ME DO WHAT I KNOW HOW TO DO. I DIDN'T arbitrarily choose those fonts those colors those layouts those photos. I researched your company, your industry, your audience, your branding. really. I asked you questions, i thought about this project while I was in the shower, for christ's sake.

You also don't run into many hands-on designers over the age of 40. Most of them move up into management or out into customer service or they work for themselves so at least there are no internal layers to please. I dream of opening a little gift shop or something! Something! the idea of selling widgets is very appealing. You like my widget, you buy my widget. Design is too subjective, everyone has an opinion. Even fine artists must experience a bit of this. In order to eat, you figure out what paintings sell and you make more of those paintings or you wait tables on the side.

Now I have a husband and a young child, my personal life is so much richer than in my 20s when I worked and worked and worked. I was passionate and committed. Perhaps when my child is older and not quite so dependent on me I'll feel challenged again. or motivated. I don't know. I think i'd rather be excited about my family. Trips we can go on, memories we can make. As opposed to when i was younger, I don't want to think about work when i'm not there. My efforts at work will hardly last a few months. My time with my child? That'll last our lifetimes.

Update: apparently I've bitched about making logos bigger before and apparently i really, really want to sell widgets ;)

Remember in grade school when your mom would pick out one of your nicer, less crappy outfits to wear? You'd be called down to the ersatz photo studio manned by a polyester-suited man suffering through their own personal hell of photographing 10 year olds in all their squirmy glory. You'd be handed a cheap plastic comb which never did me much good as I have rather curly hair and combing it just encourages it to poof out like nobody's business. Does everyone have a few random wallet-sized portraits of themselves that have turned all reddish-orange from second grade? Three weeks later you'd be handed an envelope with a single shot repeated over and over and over. If you blinked in the middle of the shot? tough tittie said the kittie. That's how all of your relatives would see you on their mantels. Or, God forbid, in the family's christmas card sent out that year.

I had my picture taken for work yesterday by an actual professional photographer, instead of just a coworker as in the past. He was wonderful at putting me at ease and coaching poses that looked rather natural out of me. The harrowing part? Reviewing the digital results and realizing that I'm older. I am 40 after all. In my thirties my face certainly changed, but now? Now i'm looking middle-aged. or at least very tired. I feel like i have to redefine myself again. I realize i'm a mother to a two year old and that's more common these days. I'm a wife too. I've gotten the hang of being that too. I guess it's the "old" part. The no longer being valid thing. or something. I'm not really so morose about it or anything, just, well, a little bummed. Internally I think I'm better than i ever have been. But now my outter self is hitting the skids!

It's true, youth is wasted on the young!

Startled out of a heavy sleep at 5:30 this morning to find our precious (and i use this just as sarcastically as my mother did when referring to my brother and me) screaming her head off because she couldn't fit the froggie boots over her pajamied feet. Not a little mad, SCREAMING mad. BOOT ON BOOT ON BOOT ON.

She managed to smash one on and got the other half way on before calming down. And no matter the situation, if there is one parent wrangling the child, there is invariably another parent still in bed. this other parent isn't sleeping, of course, but they're still PRONE. something that is highly desirable in the pitch black before dawn.

I hate winter anyway, getting up before the light ticks me off even more and there is someone in the house who is SLEEPING and it's NOT me.