Rosie Barringer, 10 weeks old. Father was a lab/collie mix. Mother was a chow/australian shepherd mix. Her first night at her new home. Already peed once, pooped five times.

The Gross-Out Game has rules. We sit at the kitchen table. Dinner's done. Mommy's on the phone, the kids pick at what's left on their plates, dreaming of dessert. I spin the stem of my wine glass and decide to make up a game and so I start to speak before I know what the game is and what comes out of my mouth is: "Okay, let's play the, uh, the Gross-Out Game." Then I make up the rules. First rule is you have to use one food word and one gross word to make up the grossest thing you can think of. Second rule is each person gets a turn and then we see who wins. Whoever wins goes first for the next round. I'm judge and player. My daughter goes first. "Jelly worms." My son thinks a while. "Banana butt." I say, "Fart pickle. Okay, it's a tie, nothing's all that gross. I go first. Corn poo." "Corn poo is real." "It doesn't matter." "Potato crickets." "Like crickets sprinkled on mashed potatoes or potatoes squirted inside crickets?" "Ooh, mashed-potato crickets!" "Spinach caterpillar. Like squeezing the caterpillar and spinach comes out." "Uh, I don't know who wins. Go." "Head cheese." "Head cheese is real," I say. "Oh. Then, uh, orange pee." I seek clarification: "You mean pee juice?" "Yeah, yeah, pee juice!" "I had orange pee, after we took those vitamins." "You're up." "Okay. Um. Weiner hamburgers." "You mean like penis loaf?" "Oh, I want penis loaf." "You can't take someone else's." "Oh." "Okay, I say booger nuggets." "Like chicken nuggets?" "Okay, pee juice wins. Or whatever. Next." "Liver jelly." "Chunky testicle pudding." Laughter. We develop advertising for the product. "Chunky Testicle Pudding. Brought to you by Campbell's." "By Cannibals!" "By Can O' Balls!" "Okay, buddy, you're turn." My son says, "Salted boobs." Mt. Giggle erupts. Partly it's because we're primed by laughing at Chunky Testicle Pudding, but partly it's because his delivery is so flat and serious. He didn't think it was going to be funny at all, but we crack up. I think the visual of salted boobs on a plate in the middle of the table is so disturbingly wrongly gross that we have to laugh to keep the ickies at bay. I say something like when you salt them, the nipples shrivel up. This leads us into developing advertising for this product, too. Our favorite slogan we sing to the tune of the Lucky Charms jingle, the one with magically delicious. Except we sing--well, my wife hangs up the phone and comes back to the table and my daughter says, "Wait, all together. One, two, three." And we all sing, "Salted Boobs! They're nippley delicious!"

There is another working life I could have had, one in which I showered every morning and wore long pants. Instead, I rely on baseball hats and deodorant and shorts. In the winter, it's jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. I bought a new suit last year, for the first time in about a decade. In this other working life I could've had, I'd be wearing a gray suit on Monday, an olive one on Wednesday, and a blue one on Friday. I'd slide bowls of cereal at the kids instead of making them waffles, scrambled eggs, and cut-up mangoes (yes, that was this morning's breakfast). I'd drive myself to work instead of the kids to school. I'd be gone all day. Someone else would have to watch the kids after school. My wife and I would see who could get home that day before six-thirty. I couldn't be baking beet crisps in the oven (see photo above) and shrimp stir-fries and steaks on the grill; I'd be sitting down to eat what someone else had made, what I'd brought home from take-out, or maybe I would have already eaten at some meeting. By the time I'd get home, the kids would've already done their homework, maybe even had their piano lesson, their soccer practice, their dance class. The kids, in short, would have this movie in their heads about their lives, and in this movie of their lives, they would see their parents during morning previews, live the action/adventure/drama of their daily lives on their own, and then see us again during the evening rolling of the credits. They would see us in the morning, waking up, and at night, going to sleep. The rest of their days would be known most clearly only to them, and me, in this other working life I could've had, I would come home now and then and interrogate them about their days, tilting the glare of my inquisition at their pale mugs and, looming in the shadows, I would ask, "Where were you at nine a.m. this morning? Who did you sit next to in class? Did you talk to your friends at lunch? What did you do at recess? Did anyone accost you on the bus ride home? Have you done your homework? Yes or no, it's a simple question. Have you done your homework?" This other working life would have completely changed my home life. It is startling to consider how much my life would have been different, would continue to be different, if all that were changed were my job. That alone is enough to alter everything else. I would surrender nearly everything about my present life that I consider so natural, so valuable, so necessary. I would surrender the work I love, the relationships I love, the time I can't live without. I know exactly how other people do it, how families work two jobs or more, hire out all sorts of services, still go into debt, and I know for sure I'm totally fine with baseball hats and khakis, tshirts and a minivan, a little cellphone on my hip (in case the kids call from school because they're puking or I forgot to send in the permission slip) and an internet connection in the study. I'm alone most of the day, talking to the walls in my head and staring at the screen on my desk, but a touch of madness is a small price to pay for my kind of movie.

"Time to play Need for Speed: Late for School edition." We drop into bucket seats and back out of the driveway. I accelerate into a dip: the wheels drop out from under us and the chassis plummets onto its soft suspension, nearly scraping bottom. I accelerate into a rise: the wheels rise up to meet us, knocking the chassis into the air. We float. Then we feel the drop in our stomachs as the chassis falls and clanks back onto the axles. Butterflies in their stomachs, the kids whoop. "Whoo-hoo!" "Wow!" "How fast are we going?" This is a new minivan, but it remains a minivan, rolling like one of those old metal playground ducks or unicorns bolted to an ancient rusted spring. If I stop at an intersection and then accelerate into a right turn, the weight of the minivan rolls too far centrifugally left, resulting in an overturn that threatens to spin us into a ditch unless I fight the wheel and release the gas, straighten us out and then floor it, which is when exactly nothing happens. Time stops. Gas floods, the fuel line clogs or whatever, the whole cramped-up apparatus groaning like a big man pushing himself up off the couch. And so I have plenty of time, there in the middle of the morning's commuter traffic, to ask the kids if they have all their homework in their bags, their lunches and books and papers, the money for the field trip, the form for the class photo, and they say yes yes yes yes yes already yes. I ask them what CD do they want. They sing a few bars. Dunh. Duh duh dunh dunh. Wahn wahn. Dunh. Duh duh--yeah, yeah, White Stripes, I say. Where did they come from? Detroit, I say. How old are they? Oh, I don't know, six, eight years. Something like that. They're kids? No, the band is that old. They're, I don't know, my age. I don't know. Maybe younger. It's the new album, Get Behind Me, Satan, which is appropriate since I believe Satan is behind us honking like crazy, but anyway the kids like three or four songs from the album, and the music is something we can all listen to and be not yet sick of, unlike Smashmouth, unlike Fatboy Slim, unlike, well, anything on the radio. Can't listen to rap or hiphop without rumps dropping and shaking that bleep for me, girl, and so on to classical or jazz, safe and soothing and it puts me to sleep until I feel a movement, like someone gently pushed in a chair for me and I sway back a little and then move forward with it. Trees walk toward us, waving their branches. Fenceposts click by, one, two, three. Is the cow walking toward us or isn't he moving just a tad too fast? A chubby brown cow, briskly walking. Wait, no, we're walking. I mean, moving. We're moving. The van is finally accelerating, and we're moving again. White stripes on the asphalt blur softly under the wheels. Velocity. Forward motion. Straining against whatever was holding us back, now we get the past behind us. The kids cheer. On to school, the river of time, the debatable need for relative speed. We're rocking back and forth, rolling with the turns, suspended so softly we barely feel the days go by.

Tonight Bush scraps State of Union Address to appear on Oprah. Fresh from a public shaming of author James Frey for his memoir of lies, Oprah agreed to interview President George W. Bush about his feelings on the State of his Union.

Oprah is expected to Frey him where he sits, in a big comfortable beige chair/sofa thing on the Oprah set. If all goes as planned, Oprah will publicly shame the President for his lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about the beneficiaries of his tax cuts, about the disasters of the recent year, and about his past alcoholism.

In front of a news media stunned by this development, White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan assured them that "the President is fully on board with this. He never liked big-government elitist stunts like Union addresses anyway. He's a Texan. He's the people. And Oprah knows the people. And he's going to talk to the people through Oprah. Bush to Oprah to People. It's gonna work."

Sources claim Bush had the idea for the change of venue after a phone conversation with former President Bill Clinton. Thanks to new federal rules on unlimited wiretapping, endorsed by the President, the following transcript reveals the conversation between Bush and Clinton.

"George, look at it this way. Oprah gave it to that dumb kid. Hoo, boy, she gave it to him!"

"Yeah, heh, that was cool."

"But then what happens? What happens is a free pass. Redemption, George."

"I don't want to go to jail, Bill."

"No, redemption, George, redemption. That means forgiveness. Freedom."

"America is about the freedom I give to itself when I'm free to do so on my behalf."

"At the end of the show, the show with that dumb curly-haired kid, Oprah says that the boy learned something from his experience. Learned something! Can you believe it?"

"No kid left behind, especially at the Jackson Ranch. Heh heh."

"This kid lied. To her. To America. Oprah believed in him. And so America believed in him. But he let her down. He let America down. He embarrassed her, and he embarrassed them. But you know what?"

"Gitmo!"

"No, George. Oprah does her Oprah thing. She reframes the narrative by punishing him like God but forgiving him like Christ. I do love this woman, George. She puts this kid through an ordeal, but, by golly, she bestows her grace upon him. George! Can you see it? Do you believe? Redemption in the eyes of Oprah and in the eyes of America! He learns from his past, Oprah says, "Good enough," and America feels purified, clean as new sheets on Monday morning. Come on, George. What do you say?"

"About what?"

"Ditch the address tonight. Go on Oprah. She'll make it all better. She's America, George. Go talk to America. America, George."

"I hate these dumb speeches."

"I tell you, George, if I'd gone on Oprah when I shoulda gone on Oprah, oh, boy, my life'd be different. It'd all be different now. So different. So very different. . . ."

"You got chicken, Bill! Chickie Chicken Bill! Buk Buk Bill!"

"Don't be a chicken, George. Two words: O. Prah. Go!"

"Oh, all right."

The President appears on Oprah this evening following an Oprah special celebrating the life of Coretta Scott King, 78, who passed away this morning.

Marble derby was the Saturday brainstorm. The kids yanked the tape measure to its full extension and snapped it back, over and over, until one of them had the idea to roll a marble in its 25-foot gutter. The bubbly effects of inspiration lingered until Sunday morning when they both launched a collective enterprise: their invention business, headquartered in the laundry room. A domestic testing facility was established, and prototype experiments were conducted throughout the day. I am instructed to knock on a door. I do so. The door swings into a room in the center of which sits my son, pulling the string tied to the doorknob. He then points a National Geographic walkie-talkie at me and says, "What the," then presses a button that makes a loud bleep sound, "do you want?" Giggling is the surest measure of the success of an invention. Later, in the laundry room, sitting on top of the machines, one of them drops a pen into a dusty canyon, which prompts the other to invent the means to retrieve the pen. The device involves string and a wire hanger. The day's work can be reviewed in the torn sheets of notebook paper curled into a plastic mug beside another plastic mug of multicolored pens, both precariously balanced on the washing machine. I am not allowed to inquire into the details of these inventions, as they are still under development and likely to lead to several patents. I consider issuing multiple marbles down opposite ends of a tape-measure chute and observing the collisions. The joy of experiment lies not in the discovery of useful things but in the misuse of boring things. The kids call for me again, and I walk up the stairs to the second-floor laboratory. Surprise is the only desired outcome, and giggling cannot be patented.

So many targets, so little time. Or so little capacity to self-direct. Little projects tempt me into distraction. An article here, a little essay there. A photo book. A parody. A portfolio. The bliss of small achievements is fleeting but real. Rarely can you point to something concrete and say, "I made that," and then offer it for inspection and confirmation. And so sometimes a small object is necessary. An artist once explained to me that he painted a crushed pop can in the foreground to "hold down space." I think small achievements are like that, solid imperfections that hold down the space of our lives. They are functional, like good shoes. Take a breather. Rest easy. And then get up and keep moving because small achievements are never enough. . . . Yesterday, GM admitted it lost $8.6 billion in 2005, Hamas won elections in Palestine, Oprah confronted memoirist James Frey about his deceptive I-survived-addiction book A Million Little Pieces, and our gecko passed away from a bacterial infection that had spread throughout the gecko population at the pet store (unknown to us). Next week, Enron goes on trial, Bush delivers the State of the Union, and Alan Greenspan retires. Today is Mozart's birthday (27 January 1756). This weekend I will have my small achievements: the hunt for a new pet lizard, chores around the house, shuttling the kids to their events. A big project looms. I gotta start. Seriously. But first I have to sever my addiction to a million little pieces.

Cattle in the field reminded me this morning, driving the kids to school, of Kurt Vonnegut's quip, "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different." The kids and I have lately been unable to get to sleep on time, get up on time, make the bus. It's not farting around, really, we've just slipped behind the beat, like a slow drummer. American auto companies have slipped behind the beat, like tuba players huffing behind the marching band as it parades up the street. "The Ford Motor Company said Monday that it would close as many as 14 factories and cut up to 30,000 jobs over the next six years," reads the NYT article. The news for the industry isn't good and suggests that while those at the top have been farting around for the last few years, those at the bottom will have plenty of time to fart around in the next few. This seems symptomatic of corporate management: the unwillingness to manage the health of the company results in the emergency amputation of limbs. Long-term strategies should be looking ahead decades, for the good of all, not quarters, for the good of the stock. Anyway, I hardly know what I'm talking about. American consumers have been buying foreign cars (Toyota, Honda) and dropping the American car company's market share by forty percent. Another excerpt from yesterday's NYT article: "The Big Three automakers have eliminated or announced plans to eliminate nearly 140,000 jobs since 2000, including salaried positions. That is about one-third of their North American payroll, a rollback to a work force size not seen since the end of World War II. 'This may not be the end, but it is certainly the beginning of the end of the automobile industry as we knew it,' said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass." In light of this devastating news from Detroit, I suspect the upcoming Superbowl at Ford Field will be a less than opportune occasion to announce, again, the economic rebirth of the city. Cattle don't really savor life by farting around. They stand and chew and sniff the air, unable to appreciate the little time they have left until they're beef.

Bought DFW's latest and already almost sort of done, his (David Foster Wallace's) latest being Consider the Lobster, an essay collection, the title essay being from Gourmet and netting inclusion in Best American Essays 2005, which is the only reason I can fathom for why this book was released now, because most pieces were written in (in the order they appear in the book) 1998, 1999, 1999, 2001, 1994, 2000, 2004 ("Consider the Lobster"), 1996, and 2005 ("Host," which appeared in The Atlantic, which I read in that version and whose subject, honestly, didn't deserve the effort but which industry (shock jocks, talk radio, etc.) probably did), except for maybe DFW just doesn't write that many essays or much journalism and the publisher had to wait a long while for enough material to make a book (except two essays predate his first 1997 collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which means maybe they weren't good enough to make it in then but are fine now, ten years later?). Except it's always remarkable to me how entertaining his (even ten-year-old) writing is, and how he hasn't let up on his quirks of mixing precision and colloquialism, academic jargon and modern slang, gigantor paragraphs and wiseass footnotes that hang on like remoras to the white bellies of several sharks (I mean, pages, his footnotes go on sometimes for a page or two or three). I'd already read two of these pieces, in shorter form, when they appeared in Harper's and The Atlantic, but there were 8 others to enjoy, and especially notable is the piece on John McCain, written originally for Rolling Stone but here DFW was allowed to publish the full version (the original Word Doc named probably something like "McCain RS Story_Wallace.doc" instead of the eventual "McCain RS_edited v 8 reedited 8c approved w changes 8cii.doc") and thus surging up to 80 pages, etc. Anyway, meanwhile, the gecko's alive and digging baby food, my wife worked til 9 pm or so last night at the free clinic and is today exhausted but humbled to be in the graces of fortune, my daughter's home sick, I've already grocery-shopped for ice cream and jello and antibiotics, and when I sat at my desk, finally, I glimpsed the warning label on this glass bottle of club soda, empty, between the candle and the computer's speaker, and thought how absurdly ridiculous ("Cap may blow off"? like, any time? like, from Gatorade to Gren-Ade? "Gimme your money! I've got club soda!") and yet evocative of the oh-so-many lawsuits that gave it birth. "Point away from face and people." Uh. Okay. And suddenly Dick Van Dyke, Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey are engaged in competition to see who can keep the bottle pointed away from their face and drink it at the same time.

Tiger is a leopard gecko. Yes, we are new custodians of a baby leopard gecko, denizen of the desert, he who inhabits a 16-gallon terrarium, basks in the UVA of a $5 bulb, and must be force-fed beef baby food via syringe. Having lately been reading about neuroscience and having lately finished a novel (Requiem, by Curtis White: awesome) and having just yesterday opened Tiger's bendy jaws and squirted Gerber product into his little white mouth, I had this half-awake dream from the point of view of Tiger himself, as if I possessed no upgrades to the standard model reptilian brain and were therefore squirming to escape the thick warm walls (fingers) and wriggle free of the rising eclipse of some blunt bright thing (syringe) pressing and parting my jaws . . . and, well, it was freaky. Poor guy. I had a restless sleep, but at least Tiger, who is nocturnal, had food in his belly. His basking lamp goes on in the morning to simulate desert sun. Above is a photo of my brother cleaning our gutters on Christmas Day. His gift was one of barter: fixer-upper chores, including installing cabinet lights and assembling complicated toys. My son received a variety of radio-controlled flying machines, including a flying hover disc and a helicopter. He enjoys these but is this week far more possessed by the desire to issue urgent notices of Tiger's condition, including diagnoses and remedial actions. Tiger will be the center of domestic attention for a while, at least until the puppy arrives. No, no date set on that yet. I'm still having nightmares about baby food.

This post continues the discussion designer Greg and I were having on the SpeakUp comment board. Our misunderstandings were telling. Each had something he wanted to say, regardless of what the other was saying. Rather than interpret each other, we rephrased our own ideas. In the end, I believe I wanted to say something grand about one's psychological and philosophical relationship to work while Greg wanted to air grievances against and remedies for designers presuming to be artists by promoting their own styles, irrespective of client demands. (My sense is that designers bend over backward to satisfy clients, not the other way around; perhaps this premise was responsible for our continuing misunderstanding; I saw the client/designer relationship as one in which the client has the power, whereas Greg thought (I'm ascribing thoughts to him; I shouldn't) that the designer wields the power).

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[An excerpt from Greg's response: “What if instead of creating your own style based on stuff you happen to like, you were to expand your knowledge of existing movements and try to use them as best is appropriate? Perhaps this reveals me as a classicist, but I don't think we've explored what we've got enough to go filling the heads of young kids with notions that they have to ‘discover’ their own style, plant their flag and wait for someone to need them. ‘Here's my work; love it or don't,’ is what an artist would say, and newsflash: we're not artists. I'm not saying there's no need to be creative, and I'm not saying appropriate, appropriate, appropriate. In fact I think it takes more creativity to use what we've built over the last hundred years and combine things in a new way, than it does to try and extend a style you've built for yourself to cover the needs of others.”

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I think we're talking past each other. I'm reacting to your original proposition that we can be everything to everyone, that there isn't much to be anyway, and that being everything isn't hard. Now I think I understand that you didn't actually mean that. After all, you have to admit that it would at least be kind of difficult for one person to design type, magazine layouts, cover art, websites, film credits, books, street signs, tshirts, catalogs, and packaging in any style in any combination. A client could exhaust your capacities in no time. "Do a little Sagmeister with a dash of Venezky. No, too much Carson. How about more Hans Schleger? A dash of Rian Hughes. More Pentagram. Too much Emigre." This is a parody of the process, but the process can feel like parody. What you're getting at, I think, is that certain kinds of stubbornly egotistical designers put too much stock in their own "distinctive" style, and that their refusal to bend is arrogance in action. In other words, no prima donnas. So you have certain real designers in mind who tick you off. That's fine, but I couldn't care less about them (although in the market guide, you should see how often editors/ad folks insist on freelancers showing portfolios with a consistent, discernible style: employers ask for style, probably to make their decisions into the easy binary thumbs up or thumbs down). You could, empirically, survey the aesthetic styles and project-development styles of designers and then prescribe a remedy to various identifiable "types." The problem is what's your model? What do you want them to be, and why? I think it's simply impractical, if not impossible, for everyone to be good at everything, and I don't desire this outcome. To get around this, you argue that being everything only means being facile with a few "looks." I'm guessing you'd ask a client whether they want clean/dirty, traditional/hip, slick/grungey, Baby Boomer/Gen X, Y, Z. I often do the same thing because obviously you're right that explaining the principles of one discipline to someone in another discipline requires some translation of concepts into different jargon (designspeak to businessspeak or legalspeak or litspeak or Hollywoodspeak, etc.). But this shouldn't be confused with the much grander proposition that we can be all things to all people. I can't even talk to everyone, let alone design for everyone. There are differences in language and priorities and emphasis and, at bottom, my own limitations (and my desire: I turn down work if I can't or don't want to do it). Okay, so let me wrap this up. You're focusing on designers loosening up and responding better to the needs of their clients rather than stubbornly pushing the infallibility of their own "style." Fine. I'm arguing, first, that personality is not style; second, that facility with all historical styles is empirically impossible and morally undesirable; and third, that through their own relationships to work, individuals create their own personalities (I'm talking philosophy/psychology here, not the style of a website or poster). Okay, gotta run. It's been fun.

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[Greg’s final sentence his response was: “What I'm saying boils down to this; don't focus on one thing or one style and only do that well. Do everything well. Or at least try.”]

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And I say, again: impossible and self-defeating to do or try to do everything well. On one extreme, you have the self-promoting purists who insist on the superiority of one (their) style. On the other extreme, you have your ideal designer who is a master of everything. My designer is somewhere else on this spectrum, maybe on a different spectrum measuring something other than facility with the shell game of style. I don't care about pushing envelopes or where designers fit from the perspective of Design (teachers may push you to take your place within Design's larger narrative, but that's a different topic). I'm saying after you survey what's out there, after you know a little and experience a little, after you wade ankle-deep through the shallow pools of market guides, you have to decide what kind of work you want to do (desire), how well you're going to do it (capacity/will), and how intensely you're going to focus on it (hobby/livelihood/calling). You can't live your life or pursue design by clicking on the drop-down menu of history. What I'm saying is doing this is harder than what the style snobs do (stand in the place where you get paid) and harder than what your jacks-of-all-styles do (jump around, jump, jump, jump around). Trying to do everything well is a rationalizing strategy that covers up the dilemma of not knowing what you want, where you want to go, who you are. Again, don't confuse style with personality. You can bite someone else's style, but you can't make a personality by mimickry.

It doesn't look like anyone else is listening to our little discussion, but I think it's been productive to work out what we're talking about, even if we're still working it out. Unpaid, I might add. And in our own styles. Because we're stubborn.

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As the holiday hosting of visitors has finally drawn to a tapering close, I have yet to dismantle the ornaments, the tree, the garlands and lights. Today, today, yes, it must be today. I have as much relish for the packing of boxes as a democratic senator does for confirming Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, but it will be done, sooner or later. And in Mecca they have the hundreds of bodies of the trampled to attend to. Irony costs nothing for the viewer and everything for the participant. It rains. Our backyard is a delta of runoff. Mothers drove the minivans to the bus stop today to pick up the kids and drive the fifty yards back home. I got a late start, backing out of the driveway when my kids leapt out of the automatically opening side door of a neighbor's minivan, my daughter shouting, "How could you forget us again?" Too much to keep in mind. I finished a book recently, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, by V.S. Ramachandran, a smart neuroscientist with amazing news about how our brains work (and terribly bad jokes about George W. and academia, as if to relieve the intensity of having to decipher his jargon by making us wince). Meanwhile, I burned myself out with writing in the last month. I published something today on SpeakUp. And since the morning, I've posted comments about the business of design:

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There are the individual designers trying to make a living by seeking work; they have to sell themselves (timeliness, flexibility), their abilities (Java, Illustrator), and the work itself (whatever the "style"). The burden for finding paying work is placed on the individual. The employer/magazine, etc., hunts a little, too (sourcebooks, market guides, word of mouth). This is the day-to-day dynamic we're all familiar with. The narratives here meet in a kind of center: the employer seeks good people, tries to avoid bad workers while the designer seeks good employers, tries to avoid getting screwed over. There is signaling, the waving of hands and pay rates, and somehow the two come together in temporary economic relationships. The narratives here are personal: designers see from within their own life stories while the employers from theirs. Hence the conflict between what the designer wants for a good working life and what the employer wants for an efficient and profitable enterprise.

Long-winded. Sorry.

Okay so the next level is one that looks from the point of view of Design, that is, the story of design as its practice and aesthetics have evolved over time. Here you get style trends. You get the good and bad habits of individual designers collectively viewed from above to suggest in toto some kind of grand movement (made up of strands of little movements). All of Design's particles make up its wave (or at least individuals may attempt to imagine such a theoretical narrative and impart to one's own conception of it a structure or progression that can be expressed in shorthand, as in Modernism to Postmodernism, Garamond to Grunge, etc.). It may be that from this view it doesn't seem so hard for an individual to absorb discrete expressions of historical style, tongue them up into little paper balls, and spit them through the straw of one's working life at the screens and brochures of whomever's buying. It doesn't seem hard to do this, I agree. And your opinion that designers who refuse to do this are "navelgazers" (i.e. unreasonably inflexible) stems from the premise that designers today need to see themselves neither from Design's point of view nor from their own point of view but, instead, only from the employer's point of view: designers should ideally act like a cheap straw with a big box of stylistic spitballs. This is, in one way, what many freelancers (designers, writers, artists) do to survive, but while it's theoretically benign from the employer's point of view, it is, in practice and from the freelancer's point of view, rather back-breaking and mind-hollowing to pull off.

What I mean: I've written for magazines for over a decade. I write a while, then I quit. Then I come back and write awhile (money! credit! whee!), then I quit. Working for myself is what produces some good stuff, and then I decide, "Hey, I should make some money," and then I start trying to write TO magazines. I absorb. I adopt. I mimic. (It's a uniquely human capacity, mimickry having to do with certain neurons in the brain; sorry, been reading lately.) Anyway, I feel emptied out after a while and so need to quit. In other words, seeing one's own work from the points of view of others (employers, Design, Literature, History, etc.) is an outside-in perspective on one's own value. Adopting the incentives of others works only so long before the balloon of optimism inside you deflates. This is the point where people revert to quotations. This is where the psychological burden of juggling jobs and styles and external demands drains your economic life as well (and may result in poor work the employer might notice).

Shit, I'm long-winded today. Almost done.

So while it's theoretically possible to spitball your work according to the whims of employers, it's dangerously dehumanizing to the person in practice. There are other perspectives in which to value one's own work that do not depend on the ability to work god-like miracles on a quick turnaround for $10/hour. The obstacles, however, are great for the individual to surmount precisely because the economic dynamic today is rather hostile to the individual freelancer, which is why it's easy to accuse me of idealism in arguing for the individual perspective. But I think the economic perspective (seeing the dynamic from the employer's point of view) has all the support it needs. I don't think companies or the market needs any cheerleading from the little guy. It could really care less. Of course, the market would reward (barely) designers who could be all things, all the time. That's the given. The question, as you bring up, is why then shouldn't we try? The answer: because we don't want to.

......................................

[Greg then responded, nicely, and suggested he didn't see where we disagreed. I responded:]
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But, Greg, your summing up of your opinion expresses exactly where we disagree. You are resigned to the status quo of reaction: client need dictates your response. A tap on the knee, and you kick up a website, a brochure, a logo. I don't doubt that this practice exists. As I say, many freelancers (writers, designers, illustrators) do this to survive (hell, I do it all the time; but then again I can burn this kind of work to ashes and feel nothing). Anyway, I don't see how accepting this is the means to "something new." You're making a virtue of a vice. I do admit, however, that my view depends on the skull of the designer actually containing the intractable throb of a yearning. The yearning has to do with a desire to do good work, both objectively and subjectively. It doesn't have to be satisfying. Good work can poke your finger and make you bleed and want to try again. Work isn't an ice-cream sundae for the soul. But I have met folks, not necessarily designers, who simply don't have the desire to do any specific thing. They just want money or honor or compliments or status. This kind of person is your kind of designer. It's not mine. And let's be clear: I'm talking about a kind of creative person I would like to be and that I would hold up within whatever creative field as a good model. This model may be at odds with what the employer is looking for. In fact, almost by definition it will be because employers don't want the messiness of personality at all; they want the efficiency of work product. So I still think you're looking at yourself from the employer's point of view, not from your own. You don't need a new idea. You need your own work. And I can't think of a more challenging project: creating your own personality through work.

I work at home. So it’s up to me to throw the holiday office party. One of 7 million self-employed Americans who work at home, I know how hard it is to motivate myself to organize the festivities. Two years ago, I bailed on the whole idea, and I got complaints. Last year, to make up for past apathy, I went a little overboard, and the morning after the party, I accused myself of sexual harassment. I might have been a little drunk. Can I blame me? It was a tough year, economically. Maybe I groped myself by the color laser printer, and maybe I later confronted myself with the digital photos I’d taken. I can’t be sure; it was a crazy night. This year, I went traditional with tolerance, like eggnog without the nog. I did not do Secret Santas because I didn’t want to offend myself if I didn’t happen to celebrate Christmas, but I did do Secret Non-Denominational Gift-Givers. I blabbed to myself in the office, though, and spoiled the surprise. I know exactly who my Secret Non-Denominational Gift-Giver is. Duh. But the question is: do I know who my Secret Non-Denominational Gift-Giver is? The holidays are always good for a thrill. In moderation, of course. Which brings me to codes of conduct. This year I taped a set of rules to the back of my chair, and they seemed to have had effect. I didn’t force myself to put up Christmas decorations, which would have violated my human rights, and attendance was kept voluntary. I had the office party this past Saturday, and it was successful. I watched what I wore. I kept my pajamas on. I made sure to talk to myself so I did not monopolize conversations. I did not insult myself or overstay my welcome because I remembered that even though it was a party, it was still business. I did not let my guard down in front of myself. I didn’t jeopardize my reputation. Like always, I was the one who had to dress up as Santa, but I kept the routine clean. And despite the peer pressure, I begged off the karoake. I didn’t pig out, but I did nibble at everything out of respect for the host, since I went to the trouble of making it all. I didn’t let myself walk drunk from the office to the bedroom because I might have fallen and hurt myself. I crawled safely into the hallway and then I turned over on my back and pushed myself along the wood floor with my heels. On the way out, I thanked myself for all the trouble. I did indeed drink a bit much, and so I ended up spending the night with myself. But I plan to send a thank-you note and even to give myself a call before the end of the week. It’s common courtesy.

If it's too late to click, then make a gift. If you're running into shipping deadlines for your online-shopping errands and the iPod is too expensive (don't even think about the iShuffle; you'll buy that, realize giving it to one person will only make others jealous; so you'll keep it for yourself, then quickly exchange it for the iPod anyway), then here are a few ideas.

The kids and I often make collages. We cut up magazines and catalogs, newspapers and old books we pick up at second-hand sales or library giveaways, and we arrange the clippings on notebook pages, on large sketchpad pages, or even on posterboard, which the kids then tack onto their walls or corkboards. Instant creative and personal gift that you can forever humiliate people for even thinking about throwing away. I like to collect collage material that has to do with the receiver's interests, from motorcycles to skydiving, Madonna to Tiffany jewelry (if you can't buy the real thing, you can at least sneak a photo into a collage; okay, that makes collages sound really cheap and sneaky, and they're not or at least they shouldn't be; okay, just buy the damn jewelry already).

You can forget the photo clippings altogether and cut up construction paper, cardboard, or other paper materials, and maybe clip out some choice text from a magazine, and arrange that into a more artistic collage, not so literal. My son and I just used kitchen utensils (cheese graters, colanders, spatulas, a cooling rack) as tracing and drawing tools (idea attributed to this guy's great design book). Hold the object on a sheet of paper, trace it, or fool around with it, and eventually you end up with odd, interesting geometric shapes, like spirographs but not so rationally reiterative. Cut 'em out, arrange, glue, and frame it. Find cheap black frames at Target.

Another recent idea I had (well, with my brother's inspiration) was to design not just any old collage or art but a film still, like a movie scene, starring the person you're giving the gift to. So you invent characters, a scenario, and, avoiding any South Park connotations, you arrange an action scene for an imaginary movie starring your brother, your nephew, your sister-in-law. You could also design the film poster promoting the movie and go totally over the top with the kind of "Sensational!"/"Hit of the Year!" graphics and triumphant text that go with this kind of thing. (Easy to cut out this kind of text from any magazine; just don't put your friend's head on the body of Kevin Federline; that's so state fair.)

If framed art might be too Extreme Makeover: Home Edition presumptuous, then make a book of this stuff. Buy one of those blank journals (any bookstore), and paste into its blank pages some of your collages, your art, some cut-out poems from literary journals your artsy cousin keeps giving you. You can also go online and collect tons of writing that might interest this person (attorney's note: always attribute copyright owner, and do not disseminate in public (editor's note: disseminating in public can get you thrown in jail for indecency)). You can also write a nice letter. If you're thinking enough in advance, you can jot notes for a month or more to this person, say, instead of emailing them or not talking to them at all. In fact, you can print out your old emails and preserve some of your choice exchanges with this person in the nostalgic permanence of your thoughtful journal. You can also drop in some actual photos of you two for good measure. Good gift for someone with a girlfriend/boyfriend/fiance/spouse (no stalkers, please).

Another good gift for a significant other, especially from the mute male to the worried woman, is to write on each page of a nice blank journal yet another reason why you love this person, why this person is great, etc. If this is getting too Oprah for you, then you know you're on the right track to your lady's heart.

If you still just want to buy some stuff, there is a new book about creative projects called 52 Projects (website here), and also here are some cool places (online) that I posted at clusterflock.org, a communal blog. For many of you, there's an ice storm out there. So play it safe and stay home gluing your fingers together at the kitchen table. Better than skidding into a ditch of credit-card debt.

Sunrise looks like sunset if you dreamt of yesterday's news. To wake the kids this morning, I plugged in a thousand holiday lights in the great room and then considered the significance of the number 1,000: North Carolina recently executed the thousandth prisoner since 1976. It was by lethal injection, like California just did with Stanley Tookie Williams, and not the electric chair, electric shock being in my mind and at my fingertips as I pushed the burnished prongs into the wall socket. Happy thoughts. So I turned on a holiday compilation CD that opens with Stevie Wonder. Up the stairs I tilt my head, rolling it side to side, not in a shameless imitation of Stevie singing, "Everyone's a kid at Christmastime," but, rather, in a vain attempt to relieve the paralytic stress caused by hours of online shopping. Online was where, in the cleavage of a Victoria's Secret model, I glimpsed a clutch of California Representative Randy Cunningham's $2.7 million in bribes. Or, as I clicked to view a larger image of a moisturizing lotion, I acknowledged with a certain horror the slightly droopy expression of Parisian Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old woman who just became the first person to receive a face transplant. The longer I shopped, the more I clicked, and the more I clicked, the more news vaulted the barriers of my consciousness. Once I bought a little, I had to buy a little more, and, thus buying, I came to learn more about the events of the day and, perhaps, to become confused in the process. This holiday season, federal marshals shot and killed a mentally ill airline passenger who said he had a bomb in his backpack. If The Bipolar Express pulls up to your front door, don't get on. A six-year-old reportedly singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in a vehicle on the highway was crushed by a Boeing 737 that had skidded on snow and right off a Chicago Midway runway. I picked up socks and pajamas from bedroom floors, and then, my mind flashing with the online Confirm-Order screens of what I'd bought for them the night before, I nudged my kids awake, feeling a shock of disbelief in this season about believing.

Decoration leads to art, if you're stubborn. We put lighted garlands on the mantle. Looked good but made our blank walls look blanker. We decided to hang pictures on our blank walls, but we were sick of the old stuff. So I searched for new stuff. I cut art from magazines and books. I cropped the art to fit the frame. I was unsatisfied. I cut into the art and snipped up bits of magazine stuff. I glued the bits into collages. I stared at what I'd made, and I had this thought: Art is what you stare at long enough to want to figure out why. This thought made me self-conscious. I regarded the thought itself as one only an artist would have. It's the thought of the artist looking at his own work and hoping a future audience will feel the way he does. Knowing they won't is also part of this feeling.

Call him a sissy and he'll buy an SUV. Guys whose gender-identity surveys revealed them to be FEMININE avenged their humiliation by expressing, in follow-up hypotheticals, interest in buying SUVs, support for the Iraq war, and distaste for same-sex marriage. Yesterday I leased a minivan. I preferred the hybrid SUV thing (fit better, felt better) but bought the minivan (cost friendly, kid friendly). During the test drive for the SUV, I listened to radio news: President Bush spoke of the new and improved plan for training the Iraqi military and police force. I accelerated and cornered.

Like the White House (mighty columns, closed doors), the dealership showroom was designed to simultaneously tease (fast cars, fat tires) and threaten (big place, tiny print) one's masculinity. The salesman delivered news of the lease quote, and I hit the "Seek" button of my mind's radio, leaving WSUV (All Ego, All the Time) for WMVD (Humble Home of the Minivan Dad).

Negotiating with car salesmen is like asking questions at a White House press conference: truth is not what this is about. Somebody's getting away with something, everybody knows it, but there is a show that must go on. The script in front of you is a symbol of the director's favor, the dialogue and stage directions resistant to revision or improvisation. I can hear Rumsfeld's "known knowns and unknown unknowns" echoed in the salesman's "residual value" and "depreciation amounts," over which the salesman has as much control as any Secretary of Defense who must "go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."

Speaking of unintelligent design, I sat reading about the Dover Area School Board in Seed magazine while computers peeked at my credit rating, which turned out to be excellent. Oddly, automotive credit companies consider me a good American for maintaining a budget surplus.

While the finance guy fingered forms from file drawers, I read about Robb Willer, the Cornell University researcher who surveyed 111 Cornell undergrads and called a few random guys feminine and a few random women masculine. Reeling from the psychic damage, the guys changed their opinions and consumer preferences. Talking tough and buying big, they insisted they were the kinds of survey respondents who checked the boxes for war, gay-bashing, and all-wheel drive. Calling a woman "masculine," however, did not make her change her mind about anything.

My wife called. I admitted I was about to become an MVD. I reminded her that the "V" stood for van and that it was not a good time to discuss the other "V" word, a surgical term that would do nothing to help a guy with a minivan reassert his masculinity. I also expressed relief that, being made to wait three hours for paper to be shuffled, I had brought magazines in my Jack Spade messenger bag, a hunter-green and safety-orange satchel which one might call a man-purse or "murse." Nine hours and one malfunctioning side-door later, I was back in the dealership removing The Atlantic from my murse. James Fallows described how the subject of training Iraqi soldiers bored Donald Rumsfeld to distraction. It would take years before the Iraqi military could operate on its own. I waited two hours for the service department to replace brand-new electrical wires with brand-new electrical wires. I read the entire issue. I shouldered the murse and looked around, vainly searching for a lat machine. I pressed a button and the minivan's side door finally opened and shut on its own.

I was as unimpressed and pissed off as any mighty man who needs to tell someone, anyone, that of course he doesn't need a goddamn wire to open and shut a car door for him. The rich tennis mom pushing a stroller would not have been a sympathetic audience. "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and it can be blown up," observed Rumsfeld last year. But, given the chance, what soldier wouldn't check the box for armor?

Snow for the journey and thaw for the return. We drove 13 hours through the night to metro Detroit, arriving in a sudden whirling blizzard around 5 a.m. It was the first snow of winter. Kids went sledding on Thanksgiving morning. They had fun and got fevers. This cramped our planned frenzy to visit everyone we could in 48 hours. We drove home Sunday, another 13 hours of sick kids watching five DVDs. We stopped six times to wait in long holiday lines at travel-plaza Starbuckses. We idled in jams. We hit slush, fog and rain in the mountains. We passed trucks around curves and hit the brakes at sudden backups. In West Virginia, about twenty cars ahead, an SUV rolled in its own glass. We smelled the flambe of fire and the smoke of skidding tires. Five cops, a firetruck and an emergency vehicle zipped by on the shoulder. We cracked the window to let in sirens and the drizzle of rain. People got out to stretch in the dark of the wet and winding mountain road. Moving again, we veered around flares and crunched through spiralling mounds of safety glass. The SUV or minivan, lifted to the flatbed truck, was smashed on the passenger side. The ambulance made a slow quiet turn on the median. For better or worse, there was no rush. We passed and gave thanks and accelerated into the fog.

TV is the great default entertainment. It doesn't matter what our intent is: to watch less, to read more. TV is what we "end up" watching. I might tell myself that I as a person and we as a family don't watch much TV, but according to our Nielsen diaries, we each watch an hour to an hour and a half a day. Compared to other dads who watch sports every day and families who leave the TV on the whole weekend, we might, indeed, not watch "much" TV. But we usually watch more than our Nielsen-recorded 36 hours of TV a week. That's my guess.

I don't let the kids watch TV after school. They might go a schoolweek without watching until Friday night. But if they're sick, if friends can't play, if homework is done, if I'm too busy to concoct games for them, then I allow them to watch. Before bed, they read a half-hour to an hour. After they're in bed, I end up watching late-night TV, and this doesn't mean news. This means I'm tired and "deserve to zone out" in front of the tube and watch Comedy Central, not CNN. (I get my news from the New York Times online and in magazines like Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.) So I watch junk at night, unless I'm reading a book. Often I read until I'm tired and then I watch TV until I'm tireder. I can ride the wave of near-sleep for hours in front of the TV. I never fall asleep in front of the TV. I summon the will and end it. I aim the remote. I shake like a sick Doc Holliday at his last gunfight. Then I stagger to bed.

My wife does not stay up late watching TV. In the mornings, my wife might watch news or a morning program. On Friday, we might watch a movie. On weekends, the kids watch cartoons in the mornings. We didn't watch much TV these past weekends because we've been out of the house, out of town, or have had company spending the weekend. Saturday mornings are no longer the great cartoon event of the week because SpongeBob and Kim Possible are on 24 hours a day. We rarely go out to movies, maybe once every two months. I can watch a whole movie while walking on the treadmill, however, and I rented six kid-movie DVDs for the holiday roadtrip.

My son was recently sick. If your kid is too sick to watch TV, you know he's sick. If he's too sick to go to school but well enough to watch TV, you know he's getting better. TV is the default entertainment for the sick and the tired. And at the end of any given day, we all feel tired, if not a little sick.

Race was the first lie. Being parts English, Polish, Scottish, and Luxembourgian, I qualify as "White," but my wife is one-half of a non-European ethnicity, which makes our children one-quarter NEE. The demographic forms of the Nielsen TV diary, however, did not make allowances for fine gradations. So I checked "White" and moved on. Next, I had to give ages, genders, and hours worked per week for each household member. I also had to attach a list, printed out from the DirecTV website (we get the DirecTV basic package, no movie channels) of all the channels our TVs receive. Then came the filling out of the diary and the emergence of me, The Nielsen Nag.

Fast-forward to the end of the week. I scanned every page of our two diaries for reference and mailed in the booklets. In tallying up the results, I discovered a problem. In another instance of failing to allow for fine gradations, the Nielsen diary chops up time into fifteen-minute chunks. Reviewing our entries, I'm guessing that we often put our X's in the wrong spaces, like at the half-hour, showing that perhaps we watched fifteen minutes more TV than we actually did, because that half-hour block actually signifies the fifteen-minute chunk from, say, 9:30 to 9:44. In the future, when our TV watching is monitored digitally by devices installed in the TVs or an intermediate box of some kind, this won't be a problem. We will know for sure how many Law & Order reruns we watch and how much channel-flipping we do until 1:00 am, pausing at certain reality-TV shows and infomercials we'd never admit to watching when filling out a Nielsen diary. Anyway, let's move on. One thing to note is that each person's time counts separately so that three people watching for one hour counts as three hours.

Our family of four watched 36 hours of TV in seven days on two sets.

We watched 17.75 hours on the Living-room TV and 18.25 on the Playroom TV. We watched 7.25 hours of prerecorded movies (DVD and VHS) on the LR TV and 4.75 on the PR TV. One day, I watched the Batman Begins DVD while walking on the treadmill. There was no day in which we did not watch some TV. The longest we went without watching was 35 hours on the LR TV from Saturday to Sunday, mainly because three of us were out of the house for that period. The longest stretch not watching on the PR TV was 31 hours.

Did we tape any programs? No.

Did we leave the TV on when we walked out of the room or just for background noise? Never.

The longest continuous stretch of watching (three hours) was done by me; on the first night, I watched a DVD and then Comedy Central (Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report). The most hours watched during a day was 6.25 on Saturday on the PR TV (wife and daughter watched movies on VHS).

Over 7 days, I watched 10.5 hours of TV; my wife, 7; my daughter, 11.5; my son, 7.

We watched the following channels: Nickelodeon, Disney, Comedy Central, Animal Planet, AMC, USA, TBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, LIFE, and the Weather Channel.

The second lie was underreporting. By me. On the first night, when I flipped through channels late at night, I watched at least part of one Law & Order episode. Maybe three. There are often two on at any one time, and I will occasionally flip back and forth between the two, following two story lines. I did not correct my failure to report. I couldn't remember the stations or the channels. I just left it and moved on. I did not underreport again. I nagged, as if to appease my guilt. But why should I feel guilty?

Tomorrow: the brief analysis.