Anal Retentive

I'll admit that I'm anal retentive. It's gotten worse as I've gotten older, but it's proven a valuable asset in my career. All my supervisors have commented on how they know they can give me a task and know that it will be done—and done correctly. If I have to catalog or inventory something at work, I'm in my Happy Place.

I know at times this drives Ben to distraction (or at least bemused laughter), but at least I come by it honestly. Having been raised by an architect and an interior designer who both demanded a clean, uncluttered home environment, it left an indelible mark on this boy's psyche. My own years in the architectural profession added to that and taught me about design, balance, and color. That is why I will get up from the sofa to straighten an out-of-kilter painting on the wall, move some object two inches to the left, or why I prefer the blinds to be pointed one direction instead of the other.

One of the biggest lessons I've had to learn over the past seven years with Ben, however is that I can't always have it all my own way where matters of our domicile are concerned. Fortunately we're both flexible and can compromise (I'm earth tones and Ben is bright colors which makes things interesting), but clutter is the one thing that still makes me crazy. There are times I look around our place and realize that there isn't a single horizontal surface that doesn't have something stacked on it.

Things could be worse. I could be a hoarder. Or is the fact that I'm a such neat-nick actually the polar opposite of that and in need of a television intervention?

But I digress.

One of the outlets for my obsessive compulsiveness is recreating the meme graphics I find on the internet. By the time I see them they've been copied and resampled dozens of times and the quality is usually pretty crappy by that point. This bothers me. I love the messages they're conveying, but the fact that in most cases they look like shit is annoying as hell. I want to share the fun far and wide, but I'm not going to repost something that looks like that.

So I track down the original graphics and thanks to my mediocre  Photoshop skills, I create a fresh copy of whatever meme it is that's captured my attention.

Ben thinks this is all very amusing.

The first one I redid was Rupaul commenting on the 2012 election:

Then the infamous "then idiots happen."

Sometimes I have to make compromises. Finding the original background images can be difficult. Case in point, "Dear Vladimir." I was unable to locate the original parchment background or the matching font (at least for free), so I had to make some changes.

"OOH GIRL!" and "Bobby's 12 Fucks" (my most recent) are two more examples. It took quite a bit of time with the Google to find the original background images for those…

Harmless fun I suppose. It allows me to channel a bit of my creativity since I still haven't acclimated back to Phoenix summer heat enough yet that I can be out wandering around the city taking photos…as much as I'd love to.