I believe you have my stapler

There are only so many ways to spice up the benign décor of an office cube. I work for an office furniture dealer. Our business is making offices looks welcoming and trendy and colorful and yet still I stare at sand colored panels and granite colored desk tops all day. I want the people around me to know that I won’t settle for bland; I am not a bland person. I want color, I want humor, I want life. But even though my apartment is straight out of the clearance section of Urban Outfitters apartment dept, I have trouble reconstructing that cozy colorful chic in my corporate cave. While most of the women in the office have no trouble letting everyone know that their children and grand children are the apples of their eye as they use all available thumb tacks to plaster their cubes with baby pictures and wedding announcements and Anne Geddes calendars, I (HAPPILY) cannot use the same theme. So instead I’ve got a tasteful array of pictures. One of the fam, one of Zoey, one of the Ann St conquistadors, one of Doc and I at Lollapalooza (to show that no, I am not a directionless downtown spinster, yet I am still young and carefree and love music festivals more than a ring on my finger). But its just not enough. It still looks like any other employee cube trying to prove that they have a life outside of the office.

But since I am not going to spend $10 on a “Drab to Fab!” DIY office cube decorating book (Who IS buying this book? What office would let an employee decorate their cube in animal fur and bamboo?? I’m going to say probably not PETA) I still have to resort to pieces of me (and Ashlee Simpson) around my area. So I’ve taken to going to great lengths to find an appropriate yet thought provoking and eye catching background for my computer. No standard Windows XP “bliss” rolling green hills for me.

First was a painting made by a 4 year old "prodigy/fraud" named Marla Olmstead. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to exploit the simple, superficial view of abstract art. The idea behind the documentary was that these parents are trying to sell their 4 year old daughter's finger painting as masterpieces from the prodigy of Picasso. I am slightly torn with this argument. On one hand, I have always been a supporter of "everything is art" and anyone can create beauty in their own eyes and who are we to disagree? But this story seems to teeter on parents trying to cash in on the gray area of abstract art. Personally, I love exploring the Contemporary Art Museum, not for the art itself, but for what is behind the art, what the artist saw in it. And something tells me this cute little Marla was not thinking about starting a revolution or a new dimension of the mind with her paintbrush and cute little bob haircut. So even though I have to agree with the skeptics on this one, the art is still colorful and fun and has a cool and controversial story behind it so I used her as the splash of color and creativity my cube needed.

So now its time to mix things up for the next honored piece of art to be showcased in my 8x8 number-crunching platform. Erin showed me this awesome toolbar feature called Stumble Upon. Its a button that gets added to your toolbar that takes to you any thousands of random websites to explore. When you download it, it asks what your interested in and tunes into what you want to read about. I chose art and photography as one of my interests so when i click my little "stumble upon" button during a slow Friday afternoon at work, I usually find myself at photographers websites. I would spend too much of company time staring at photos of commonplace items brought to the forefront of your attention because of the colors and sharp focus of them. And the way photographers can make you want to land in middle of exquisite nature. So when I thought photography might be just the thing my computer needed, who better to look to for a shot than Annie Lebowitz, the legendary photographer in the inner circle of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. I love her work for the same reason I love abstract art. The stories behind them. Her book is story after story of photo shoots with celebrities all over the world. I love nothing more than to hear about how the Vanity Fair July cover project came to be and her Alice in Couture feature in Vogue and, of course, the infamous and sobering photo of J. Lennon and Yoko the day of his assassination. Chills.

So after clicking through hundreds of shots that she has done, I found one of Pete Seeger's banjo with a saying that stuck with me. "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender." What more is there to say?