Thursday, July 06, 2006

Forty-three or You Can't Keep a Good Imagination Down

The descending numerical titles were starting to seem a little tedious - all the same, I can't resist the morbid fascination of watching time run out.

An alternate title would be "Avoidance is a Force to be Reckoned With" because yesterday at 5 pm when the last patient had left and I was staring morosely at the enormous stack of insurance forms and prescription refills on my desk, it came to me.

All at once, I knew exactly how the black silk dress was going to look. Bear with me, it looks a whole lot better inside my brain. (I wonder if you can take correspondence courses in fashion drawing.) I knew I wanted strong vertical lines skimming the body and accentuating (and in certain places creating the illusion of...) the curves. I had been mulling over a number of not-quite-right ideas, and then it hit me: cables.

I have been enamoured with cables for some time - I like to think it's a sort of primal connectedness with the knotwork of my Scottish / Viking heritage. An instance of "collective memory," perhaps. Also, cables and lattices have that whole sexy, curvy, semi-botanical, twining business going on.

Then, because I was still not ready to face The Stack, I went for a little cruise in blog land. And discovered that my cable brainwave is, in fact, up-to-the-minute trendy. This happens rather frequently to my brainwaves, and I find it spooky and mildly disturbing, because as much as I would like to believe that I am blessed with hipness and finely honed fashion instincts, it is far more likely that I have merely been ensnared by sneaky subliminal suggestion. So much for my noble efforts to avoid mass media manipulation by getting rid of cable TV.

However, my design will most assuredly not feature giant crystal-studded puffy sleeves, nor will it look like it had an accident with a chainsaw (not on purpose, anyway). So perhaps I am My Own Woman, after all. (This, and this I thought were very cool designs, though.)