It was Pluto

Pluto in Capricorn, that is the one causing all the secrets to come out. I think the effect it is having on me is that I expect things to be exposed, so I help it along. At last night's meeting, I just silently willed someone to ask a particular question, and they did! I'm not really supposed to contribute, when I'm taking minutes, so I try to keep my opinions to myself and reserve input for procedural things, like whether or not I should keep minutes during executive sessions. (The answer is no, though I would love to. Not that anything juicy might be going on, but it could be, and I definitely want to listen.)

Sometimes that is very difficult, and sometimes I do speak, but I have found that if I wait, there are almost always others who are having the same concerns. As with volunteering, many times if you step aside, others will come forward who might have seemed to be willing to let you do it all. Things work better if people who might hang back are given the space to step forward. They won't do it if the over-enthusiastic are always jumping to the front, dominating. It takes practice to let the silence settle when no one volunteers, and not be the first to fill it.

I had thought about some behind the scenes collusion to make the discussion happen last night, but vetoed that as dangerous. That tangled web again. Funny to think I am guided by something I heard at age seven but that does seem to be the case. I'm sure it was the reinforcement of that over the years that cemented it in place. I'm grateful for a moral compass of some kind, though, even if it did come with some shaming, because obviously she was letting me know that I was a little liar back then when I was her daughter's best friend. Survival trumps morality, with us humans.

In my work world, I printed something yesterday that came out kind of bad. The separations hadn't been made properly because I forgot to give the client, who was also the artist, strict instructions on how to make them, and the deadline was very tight so I didn't do all the pre-press checking I usually do when it is my art. By the time I remembered all the ways I make sure my results are the best possible, the stuff was almost finished and I knew she wasn't going to be happy with it. It wasn't a lot of shirts, so I took a tiny little brush and fixed most of the places where the two colors hadn't quite met perfectly.

I have often resorted to the tiny brush. One time I missed a section of a color completely and had to go back and paint in a lot of shirts, and I always have to repair hat prints because it is very hard to print those pesky things with that seam down the middle. It's embarrassing to admit to the client that I made bad products. Even though I have a fairly cavalier attitude about it ("It's just a t-shirt!"), the clients and the retail customers really do expect perfection. Here's one I had to do over, because I got the kerning a bit wrong, and it seemed to say "JUST ICE". That one bit hard, because I did them for free. Twice.

My favorite story about that is when I made some shirts a long time ago, for Nice Rice the original, which said "Fresh Squeeze" for their orange juice. When I was crafting the hand drawn letters, I left out the U in squeeze (Freudian, I know). I printed the 50 shirts, all handsigned because he wanted that, and it took a couple of weeks before a little kid said "Mommy, what is sqeeze?" No one had noticed. I had to redo the art, the screens, and print 50 more for free.

Here's the second version, almost worn out. I have one of the originals, probably buried in a deep hole. On Pluto. We call those kinds of things "collector's items."

Perfection is an unrealistic expectation, but not to most customers. They're paying 'good money' and they have no idea of all the variables which have to be aligned to create consistency and high quality. It's not that I'm lazy, but things happen. Sometimes it is really not my fault. Sometimes it is.

I didn't tell my customer yesterday about the little brush, though I skated around it. I told her I use one all the time, and I told her that I am not a perfectionist and my feelings wouldn't be hurt if she found another printer who is. You couldn't tell from the shirts that I had fixed them, and I told her about the art preparation problem so we could do better next time. So, not full disclosure, unless she reads this or gets out a magnifying glass. Or unless Pluto conspires with some other planet and the things wash funny or something. Or unless I am fooling myself, which is likely.

In any case, I will have to re-do the art and screen for next time because she loves the design and will want more, and I am enough of a people-pleaser to want her to be satisfied. I suspect she is a perfectionist. I should find out her birthday. Maybe I ought to ask clients about it first thing, and not take on any Virgos.

Really I want a more forgiving world. One thing that was so perfect about the Jell-O art is that it wasn't controllable, and perfection wasn't even an issue. I have tried over the years to build in some slop so I wouldn't have these kinds of problems with my own shirt designs, and I don't do the kind of precision work I used to. As my vision has changed, I appreciate a more fuzzy outlook. It's wearing to constantly strive for perfection. I'm not convinced it even exists.

But perfectionists are still out there. Some of my clients haven't given up on it like I have. I posted a sign on my wall that says: Price, Quality, Speed: Pick two.

You can't have it all. You do get to choose which parts have to ease so you can keep the stress level down. At some point I am going to retire from custom work and just do my own, so I can eliminate the pressure of trying to meet someone else's expectations. I will try to retire my own inner critic when I do that, and find ways to only do work that can be fuzzy and flawed and still just right. I might have to change media though. Ever since we got these newfangled computer things, everyone expects life to look just like it does on the monitor screen: brilliant sharp color, infinite detail, precise alignment, a gazillion colors in the palette.

I'm going in the other direction. See me for your funky, crooked, uneven prints. I'll lend you a tiny brush and some gold and silver paint if you want to fix 'em up. We need to prize the variation that comes with hand-cut separations and ink mixing without a formula and a scale and a brand new color matching system swatchbook.

I'll just tell people I'm from Pluto, the not-even-a-planet, where we don't care about perfection, but always tell the truth. Somewhat imperfectly.