My dad used to call the kitchen table, “the projects’ table”, because I would go on and on about things I wanted to do (and was temporarily certain I would do). The ideas and enthusiasm would eventually fizzle out, but they would be immediately replaced by new ideas and new enthusiasms. Nothing got done. It was all an exercise in dreaming, which is why my dad would smile listening to me and say, whether or not we were sitting in the kitchen, “this is another one for the projects’ table”, and we both knew that table was a black hole that took ideas in and never let them back out as something real or concrete. During my university years, I had a different “projects table”, this time shared with Haydee, a very dear friend of mine. We were going to take secondhand clothes and de-construct them and put them together in new ways and turn them into something cool and sell them. I don’t think we ever finished a single piece of clothing, but we dreamt and made plans with honest eagerness. I was going to sell screen printed t-shirts, I even got a secondhand small printing table that was forever abandoned in the back of a closet and never used. What I lack in discipline I make up in imagination, which means I live in the “projects’ table”, and I am, in my heart of hearts, a dreamer. Dreaming is the curse and consequence of a big imagination, and my imagination has always run deeper and wider than my life.
I’m good with hard deadlines and thrive within structures already built for me, but the problem is when I’m left in the wild to my own devices. Still, somehow, without going about them in a straight line, but through slower, meandering lines, I have managed to do things, finish things, imagine projects and then actually work on them, and it feels good. Sometimes the triumphs are very small and still, they feel worthy of celebration. Sometimes the triumph is just finishing a couple of drawings, started long ago and then abandoned, and then rescued from the limbo of the “projects table” and brought back to life and out into the world.