confessions of a visual whore

At this time last year our new kitchen was just taking shape. As the first of the cabinets were being installed, a rented dumpster was exiting the driveway with the remnants of our old kitchen, and a large part of my life.

Gutting the kitchen and dining room was cathartic, a feeling that carried over into an overwhelming desire to purge the rest of the house. I spent a week clearing out the cellar and attic, bewildered by the amount of stuff that we (mostly I) had accumulated. 

Most of it was irrelevent and obsolete: boxes and boxes of magazines, notebooks, and clippings that spanned a wide range of interests in things that I had once wanted to cook, taste, grow, build, make, paint, learn. I questioned why, if not out of nostalgia, I still held onto them. I told myself, and my family when we moved them from house to house, that those boxes contained my inspiration. But when it takes up that much space, inspiration becomes a burden. It was time to let go.

Truth is, I stopped looking to those boxes when two forces came into play. The first was recognizing that inspiration shouldn't be a burden, it could be as spontaneous and organic as intuition. If you can already see the world in a grain of sand, then inspiration is everywhere, always. That realization was like learning that I could cook without recipes, and go on to teach others to cook as well. Inspiration works that way too. Once you learn how to turn it on, there is no course but to turn it loose. That's why I started this blog, which brings me to the second force: the Internet.

Those of you who remember life before computers, were witness to the revolution. On my first PC I was able to scan images and text and organize them in easy to access files. No more rummaging through boxes. They needed no real estate and would never occupy space in a landfill. Then came the internet, a universe of stimulus and information, and the capability to connect and share in a scope that I never imagined. 

Depending on your needs and comfort level, there are a multitude of applications that allow you to connect and share, but few also provide inspiration and the capacity to save and organize. Nothing stimulates my imagination like images and design, I can happily spend hours sifting through visual aggregate sites like stumbleupon, foodgawker, notcot, etsy, and all of the tangental sites I've discovered through them. There are so many talented people making beautiful things that inspire me, that I want to save them all. But inspiration, and obsessing about beautiful things, is an addiction. Wasn't I just replacing those cardboard boxes with an endless column of bookmarks?

I've often fantasized about making a site where I could paste collections of linkable images without the distraction of excessive text. And, because ads are the aesthetic death of websites, there would be none of that. How thrilling it would be to scroll through a page of hand-picked inspiration— my bookmarks in images.  I've also fantasized about doing the same with this blog, condensing it to a collection of photos that would link back to the post— a visual archive that didn't require endless scrolling and searching by month.

Someone heard my prayer and invented Pinterest. With 13 million users in just 10 months, there must've been many people on their knees.

To begin using Pinterest, you must request an invitation and be prepared to wait for a week or two. Why? I don't know. Then you download a button to your bookmark bar that lets you pin images to your boards hosted on their site. I was able to archive nearly 300 post photos from PWFW in just a few hours, counting the time spent scrolling down memory lane. I rarely go back into my own blog, let alone others. Pinterest could change that.

http://pinterest.com/foodplayer/playing-with-fire-and-water/