THEADORA

I have strong opinions about rooms, websites, sentences, and chairs. The rest is under review.

I look at other people’s lives and keep thinking: I want that too.

I am trying to identify the parts of my life that are chosen, performed, borrowed, or simply left on the table.

The day was full. I am not sure that means it happened.

One life contains a surprising amount of room, and still not enough room.

Deciding what someone sees first is a form of hospitality, and occasionally a form of control.

Some books, films, projects, and people are better before the ending arrives.

Career, money, taste, time, ambition, and the unfinished business of knowing when to stop.

Some experiments should end. Some are valuable because they keep the door open.

The first responsibility of a beautiful thing may simply be to exist carefully.

The person who notices every window is giving the rest of us a more detailed world.

The internet did not invent impossible lives. It put them next to the checkout button.

Taste may begin as a preference and become a record of what we have learned to see.

A book about trees, sculpture, and time that makes the desk feel less like a desk.

A website that understands the pleasure of a strange image and a good index.

A courtyard, a line of water, and the rare feeling of a building making silence visible.

It is a seat, a side table, and a small argument for objects that can change jobs.

The film is awkward, slow, and full of the kind of silence that makes a person sit differently.

It cost less than the object I bought to organize the objects I was not using.

Clothes do not solve the day. They decide how much of the day gets to argue back.

The old opinion was convincing. The new one is more interesting. I thought I wanted a clean desk. I wanted a desk that made the mess legible. There is a difference.

I keep returning to photographs of the Salk Institute. Not to understand it completely. The courtyard keeps refusing to become a diagram.

The ruler is always within reach and never looks good in a photograph. It has measured paper, a shelf, and once the width of a drawer that did not need redesigning.

The test is not the trip or opening night. It is Tuesday at 3:20, when the room needs clearing and the work is less interesting than promised.

The new idea is always clean. It has no broken link or awkward middle. I am not going to stop starting things. I am going to ask the old things whether they need finishing.

A person can now be recognizable for liking a chair, a film, a colour, or a particular breakfast. I would like to keep a few preferences private until they survive a disappointing day.

A small object can sit on a table and alter the table without holding anything. Sometimes the thing is just useless. Sometimes that is exactly why it gets to remain.

I trust people who notice the sound a door makes before they tell me whether they like the room. They have practiced looking somewhere specific.

I want to know how a website remembers me, how a building carries its weight, and why one chair makes the body sit differently from another. The questions are excellent company.

I have made a plan for making the thing, then a plan for improving the plan. The thing is still waiting. I am going to remove one condition.

A curtain had fallen half open over a window and made a pale rectangle on the floor. Nothing happened. I stayed long enough for the light to move.

It is not a good idea yet. It is a shape on a page and a reason to open a new document. It has not become boring.

The quick project now has a name, a colour, and a document called NOTES 2. It is no longer quick.

I am not buying fewer notebooks. I am becoming more selective about which unfinished thoughts get their own paper.

Being bad at something privately is a relief. There is no style to maintain and no evidence to protect.