Thursday, November 27, 2014

Handy Dandy

I always admire the skill and creativity that go into set design, especially in smaller venues where talented folks do so much with the limited space available. Really, it's one of my favourite things about live theatre. I was admiring aloud the set of a play DH and I were attending this past weekend when he turned to me and said, "You know, I always thought set design was something I would like to get into one day."

Well.

DH and I have known each other for over thirteen years, and while I accepted a lot of false advertising and bravado from him in the early days of our relationship - yeah, yeah, I'm sure he did likewise - I feel this kind of posturing is frankly silly around someone who has known you for so long. Maybe it was the low-grade headache I'd had all day, maybe it was his treading on my status in the relationship as 'the creative one', or maybe it was the threat to my financial stability that would be posed by such a suicidal career change on DH's part - whatever the reason, I couldn't let this one slide:

"But dear, you're neither handy nor artistic. That doesn't seem like a very good fit."

"Yeah, I'm handy."

* * *
You've heard that old adage about work, the sortof Venn diagram cum Catch-22 between cost, speed and quality, where you can pick only two of the three qualities? Years of household chores and minor home renovations have highlighted what amounts to nothing less than a fundamental difference of opinion between us on what constitutes "good enough". I am the sort of person who will happily shell out for quality and timeliness, while DH and his old buddies, Fast and Cheap, have preemptively smothered Quality in its sleep and ridden off into the sunset on Half-Assed Trail. Usually drunk.

Being a naturally skeptical person, I'm constantly reserving judgement for the peer-reviewed evidence of a given claim. So maybe DH is handy, it's just that, in thirteen-plus years, the evidence I have seen suggests that "set design" is pretty much to DH as "swimsuit model" is to me.

* * *
We stared awhile at one another across the Gulf of Mutual Incomprehension. (You what? You think what? Who are you?)

"Oh," I finally said. "Right." And texted myself a great idea for a blog post. Because creative one.

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