J Segal Design- Design a Life

So when I was a kid, we ate steaks as snacks. This almost got me suspended from school, but its true. Just ask my Dad. I barely remember the scenario, but one of my grade-school teachers was telling some story and, to make a point, said something about, “Imagine you’re having some really great meal like steak.” My immediate reaction, which I said out loud, was, “Ugh, I hate steak. That’s all we ever have to eat.” But we had steak so often that I really was sick of it. Sue me. For some reason, this annoyed my teacher. She was sure I was making it up, trying to pretend I was rich or something? I dunno. I didn’t see the problem, and had no idea that steak was special or out of reach of some budgets or any of that. All I knew is that 40 lb boxes of frozen steaks came home with my dad every couple of weeks, and whenever I said, “I’m hungry,” my mom would say, “Have a steak.” Now, granted, as a kid I was obnoxious and at times downright disruptive in school. The kind of kid they clai...

Lately I’ve been irritable. Some situation will catch me wrong, and the bone-headedness of it will just turn me from a calm rational adult to a 2-year-old who needs a nap. In those moments, its probably best to just give up and head home. If i can get through my front door without any further human contact, and without peeing my pants fiddling with the key, everything will probably be okay. Something about ranting and raving you should know: it rarely helps. No matter how sensible my query or complaint may be, there’s a tone of voice that pretty much guarantees that I and the offending party will not come to any agreement. I’ll just have to storm out. This happened today at JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts. Thing is, nobody actually needs anything they sell. It must be 20,000 square feet of random crap, but if you are creative at all, you’ll end up buying something. That’s the business model. We all know it. And what they sell is seasonal, so often items are marked down and stockpiled in...

I may have ruined the car. I say may have, because I’m trying to work up the courage to go out and look. See, I like to mess with things. Take things apart, paint them, carve parts off with a razor blade, stick things on with hot glue. I do that with furniture, I do it with my home. Stuff bugs me when it doesn’t look right, so I get some idea and I restyle things. I don’t ruin them too often, but it happens. Furniture is pretty easy to change, especially if its painted. If I don’t like it, I can change it again, right? The desk I’m sitting at has been different sizes, had the top changed twice, and was recently three different colors over three days. But I’m pleased with it now, I think. I added some moulding to my apartment doors. First to one, then to the others, and some extra detail moulding to amp up the casing around the entry door. But that’s it- I tell myself. We’ll see if I listen to my sage advice. I’ve learned a lot over the years with these putter projects. I’ve l...

Here at the end of my relationship, I’ve been thinking a lot about the beginning. I blame TV. I’ve been watching this YouTube Original show, Single By 30. The tension in the show, as often is the case, is the back and forth of two people who clearly want to be together. Why does TV always do that? I can’t help comparing the central relationship with my own.  Bob and I never did the back and forth thing. I was in right from the start. Pretty much. I almost chickened out once. Bob wouldn’t let me break up with him. I used to always say, when telling this story, “Bet he’s kickin’ himself in the ass, now!” 26, almost-27 years later, it still made sense.  On TV, the characters go back and forth, agonize over mistakes, even date other people to figure out what they want. We didn’t do that. I dunno; it doesn’t look fun. We just went all in. I have to admit though, that even commitment doesn’t look like it does on TV.  In real life, there are long periods of st...

I’ve been spending some time with a friend of My late partner, Bob. A guy I always playfully referred to as Bob’s “other boyfriend.” For the record, Bob didn’t find this amusing, which is all the incentive I needed. He took Bob’s illness and subsequent death pretty hard. They went to ball games together. Both worked at Walmart. Bob even got season tickets for the two of them. Just them. Not me. The only way I even knew the guy is that he doesn’t drive, and Bob was often so busy that I’d pitch in to provide transportation. Pick him up. Take him home. It didn’t bother me to help them spend time together. Bob fell ill a few games prior to the end of the baseball season, and the Indians had a chance of going all the way this year, as Bob had suspected. So the dude, Bob’s other dude, had lost his baseball buddy, and didn’t really have the resources to go to the remaining games on his own. A couple times I gave him the tickets and someone else took him. But he and Bob were connected,...

Of all the things I didn’t love upon first viewing of the formerly-dreary one bedroom apartment I now call home, the bedroom featured an enormous ceiling fan with protruding light kit. I don’t like ceiling fans in general, and this one was pretty obnoxious. To me it looked like a docking station for the starship Enterprise and 2 additional Federation vessels. The tulip shades dangling off the light kit were equipped with compact fluorescent bulbs, the scale seemed to be one size too large for the square footage, and the chains had heavy metal pulls. Luckily the whole thing is white. Ya know, for subtlety. The thing about ceiling fans, though, is they don’t have regular lights. They have light kits. There’s a contraption that has lights, pull-chains, and a seasonal direction switch which plug into specific quick-connect sockets inside the cap. Oh, and 4 screws around the outside to mount the kit. To change the look, you need a different style of light kit. A typical ceiling ligh...

I’m frustrated by furniture. Art annoys me. Color makes me cringe. Pillows give me pause. Tables? Terrifying. Even beds bother me. Such is the curse of creativity. Nothing’s ever quite right. Not yet.  Designers will tell you that they love these things, and I can’t speak for them, but my impulse to create, arrange, display; these come from a place of dissatisfaction with things as they are. In general, stuff just bothers me.  It occured to me, lying restlessly in my bed at 2:30 in the morning, that I have built or rebuilt every item in my living room. All the furniture in my bedroom/office. Kitchen? Yup. But you see, I had to do it. Everything was horrible. Nothing was quite right. To my eye, things rarely pass muster. When I was a kid I took things apart. In my teens I tried to build things. I went through a painting phase, where I did faux finishes on everything. My best friend Tom called my technique “faux-pas marble,” but he had about ten examples of it in ...

I used to wonder how people could live alone after being in a relationship for any length of time. I’m about to find out. My partner and I had been together almost 27 years. That’s pretty much my entire adult life. We never really fought, and even when things weren’t going well, splitting up didn’t seem like a thing I could do. Split up and start over? Easier to stay and work things out. Bob was extremely loyal, even when I didn’t deserve it. Even my friends marvelled at how he didn’t toss me out sometimes. A few times even I expected to arrive home to find my shit out on the lawn. But no. I guess he was raised that way. The thing that made it work was we were kind of opposite. Where I was weak, he was strong, and vice versa. I couldn’t hold a job, he couldn’t boil an egg. Stuff like that. But even though he was stable and I am impulsive, we had a shared emotional strength that combined was more than the sum of its parts. When Bob had his stroke, I was there for him. Well,...

I’ve been watching home tours on YouTube. Lots and lots of home tours. I’ve seen so many now that I’m down to the videos made by real people. Regular people? I mean non-celebrities. Turns out 20 million gets ya a pretty decent place to hang your hat. The savvy socialite could make due with half that amount. New Yorkers have a specific style; LA types do too. Then there’s the hotel-size French chateaux (the plural of chateau) that serve as weekend places of single male interior designers- also plural. I’ve seen a few of those. Then there’s the apartment tours, by which I mean rentals. Problem solving is a whole different game when gutting the place and bringing in a famous interior designer is not an option. YouTube is loaded with young couples new to the endeavor of creating a home. Over the last few months I’ve been putting together my current place, and it's pretty much done now. If I were to show it off, now would be a good time. Maybe. Truth is, I’m nervous about th...