I’m not entirely sold on the banner above, but for the time being, it’ll do.

At the moment, I’m doing a temping gig to pay the bills while I try and figure out what to do (and where to go) next. My temp job is on a university campus, in a building on the far side away from the lush green quads and the ramshackle frat houses. I sit in a cubicle all day long, staring at grey walls, grey floors, grey cabinets. On my lunch hour, I walk.

Today I walked through parking lot after parking lot with my headphones cranked up loud. The sun was shining overhead, without a cloud in the sky. And I was struck by the absurdity of this sea of metal and concrete around me. This vast landscape that was lying in front of me completely devoid of people, but entirely populated by steel.

There was a lot of grey concrete, yes, but there was also a rainbow of reds and blues and greens, dotted every so often with white, black, silver and champagne. And it was beautiful. Like blobs of paint on a palette or scraps of fabric on a seamstresses table. But it was so quiet, despite the fact that I had my headphones on to block out the silence. There were no people, no sounds of laughter, no birds, no bits of trash swirling in the corner.

All day I sit in that cubicle and stare at an ocean of grey, while myriad colors are left stagnant and stranded just a few feet away thanks to this modern era of commodity and consumption. And more more more.

I don’t think that people are crafting to get away from technology, but quite the opposite, I think they are crafting in order to better embrace it. This creation allows us to make sense of what is going on in a cold steel world by letting us remember that there is more beauty in a purled stitch than in a pixel. By letting the two interconnect and coexist, we don’t lose sight of either the absurd or the beautiful.