It's All Relative

I find myself sitting at work just like every other weekday afternoon, quietly sitting in a room that once housed thousands of files and folders, now it contains some of the most talented people I've ever met. I find myself more comfortable within these four walls, then I do confined in my own apartment. I even had them paint the walls in neon colors to drown out the lack of windows (except the window in front of my desk, but that only looks out into a giant warehouse).

I sit at a desk littered with toys and strange trinkets which somehow despite their twisted forms, bring me peace and sense of ownership around my work space. While some of these objects resemble a child's playroom, others are hints at my past: like a Cat In The Hat maquette, which we used as a reference for designing items for the movie a few years back, a 4ft wide POS display hanging on the wall, which I designed for Sports Authority the other week, foam projectiles for use in our new backyard paintball game, and a pen I picked up at a booth at the Toy Fair in NYC last year.

The room smells of pizza, as the company rewards it's employees today for a record breaking February, and of ink toner as the multitude of printers in the room attempt to keep up with the work load we inflict upon them on a daily basis. The sound of buzzing computer CPU's is lost under the random shuffle of my Ipod playing through a set of speakers in the corner of the room, on a shelf intended for printer consumables.

Everyone is quiet, the typical lunch silence, as artists come and go on their way to run errands and meet lunch buddies. However, in this room, the artists can just as suddenly break out into a wiffle ball game, or a discussion on the works of Georgia O'Keefe. The open air office, despite being a sacrifice in privacy, provides a grand soap box with a very opinionated audience.

Strange that the people you work with, spend more time with you in a day, then any loved one at home. Yet, would you be friends if work hadn't forced you to cross paths? I take the time to look over the computer screens of the other artists to review their progress, although the sight of websites and flash motion jumping around on their screens only reinforces the need for people to take a minute or two break between projects and gather up their creativity for another round of mind numbing production. A situation I understand all to well.

Funny how Ipod shuffle seems to pick the most obscure stuff from your music library, I should probably get the Muppets Christmas album off their until December. Next to my desk on the floor is a pile of paintball gear that needs to find it's way into my car's trunk at some point, at least the spare gear is there for the rookies playing this weekend. It's so easy to get lost staring into the face of some random monster action figure (I think his name is Bernard) from the book "Where The Wild Things Are" (I have the whole set on my desk), and dream about things totally unrelated to work, thank God it's still lunch hour.

I have a Dilbert calendar on my desk, it was a gift, I always hated Dilbert, but working in an office, makes some of those jokes all too close to home, today however, the joked sucked. I've been working on developing a packaging theme for our baseball line for what seems like years now, it's rather unmotivating, yet the packaging is probably some of the most progressive stuff the company has ever put out. I think the first time I see an entire planogram of it in Walmart, I may just drop to the isle floor and puke.

It seems almost scheduled that the e-mails I received around 12-1 EST are always from the west coast, at least their sleeping in China right now. At least with the 68 pizzas, I don't have to buy lunch today. Why is the phone on my desk from 1972, I should buy a cordless. I remember when we went through and removed most of the fluorescent lights from the ceiling fixtures years ago, now it always seems like the sun is setting in here (nevermind the bright orange wall we painted). Maybe that's why I feel like I'm going blind. I suppose it's time to grab hold of this trackball mouse for another 3 hours and hammer out more baseball designs, while all the while......

Thinking about you.