We spoke of changes and self-confidence, the first year first week law student and I. Being a big fish in a tiny pond fosters a false confidence in your abilities. So the first year of law school, it seems it is full of small fish from little ponds tossed into a large lake without a depth finder. A class composed of the tops of other classes from smaller watering holes. And so the process begins anew. Finding one’s place amidst brilliance. It is humbling.

I am in awe when my life parallels someone else’s. Especially in matters regarding confidence. It’s surreal, and shocking when you realize your insecurities align with those of someone you always envisioned as intelligent, confident, and better adjusted than yourself. Beneath the facades, maybe we all possess self-conscious insecurities which level the playing field, or perhaps those who don’t a too arrogant to correct their failures, not recognizing inadequacy.

As the new age of competitiveness begins, performance expectations require reevaluation. You can’t always measure yourself against your peers. There will be times when you can only try to be better than you were before and forget about being the best. We can’t all find the cure for cancer, but we can strive to be the best self we are capable of being.

Funny how it’s easier to say than to believe.

Everything has a beginning: love, hate, disaster, joy, inconvenience even madness. Beginnings serve as landmarks reminding us of the precise moment when everything turned to crap. Frequently the catalyst which sets things in motion seems inconsequential at the time. Yet there is still a burning desire to trace the exact moment things went amiss, as if knowing could effectively turn back the hands of time.

And so it began with a sliver of peeling paint on the deck rail, and a phone call. Two separate impetuses leading in opposite directions. The phone call I prefer not to consider, but the peeling paint provided a way to keep my hands busy on the phone. Phone calls require an enormous amount of pacing on my part, not that each calls is worthy of such abstract busyness, but I find it almost impossible to stand still while listening on the phone. Perhaps it is the embedded notion of feeling the constant need to multi-task or maybe just a non-threatening version of attention deficit disorder. Either way, I stood at the rail lifting paint with my fingernail until a turned a small imperfection into a gaping problem as I exfoliated the deck rail of sheets of paint exposing the raw wood.

I created the problem so it seemed only logical I correct it. I set about the business of scraping and sanding with the intent of priming and repainting. It would be my side project. A maintenance project undeserving of adult supervision, because damn it, I can paint, sand, and clean up after myself.

All was fine until the Better Half (BH) intervened and offered to help. I offered a paint scraper and resumed working. After ten minutes or so, he suggested replacing the deck flooring (a.k.a. my current assignment is too tedious and there is no credit to be gleaned from simple maintenance, I want a more glamourous, or perhaps supervisory position). I never solicited his help in this. I took responsibility for defacing my own property. I agreed and told him to do the prep and planning if he could finish in a week or less. It’s a small deck and the flooring has water damage, even if it isn’t dangerous or rotting. I continued scraping and sanding as he ran the numbers. He wants to replace the rail as well, but I refuse. The rail is usable, not worthy of a landfill, and I have already spent hours on sanding and scraping.

The next morning, we rented a truck and purchased supplies. This took four hours. Next, BH started some mild mannered demolition pulling up deck boards, as I continued sanding and scraping. During demo, BH discovers we have water damage to the siding, and feels we need professional help. I concur.

Again, he offers to help scrape paint, while we wait for the professionals. This time, he works maybe twenty minutes, before deciding this is still too tedious and thankless, and suggests we take the railing apart for better scraping. Fine, I say, label the parts so we can put it back together after painting. Once again labeling is too tedious, but I refuse to budge on this. Shit always happens, and we usually finish projects like this weeks behind schedule. He relents but walks away before demo is complete leaving me to pry out rusty nails, and continue scraping.

He lines up a repair guy, and I spend 8 hours painting primer on the rail parts. Gotta love those four sided spindles. Two guys show up for repairs and BH spends most of the day supervising and talking with them. I’m a little put out by this. Not the talking or the chest puffing, but the fact they seem to think as the token female my job drop whatever I’m doing to listen. If they don’t want to work fine, but preventing me from getting work done is a deal breaker. This is BH’s domain. I walk away to paint the deck rails. Throughout the day, I complete 4 loads of laundry, cook breakfast, straighten up, clean paintbrushes, rip a few boards, clean the pond filter, and cook dinner. The BH, well he supervises, and he watches me paint.

That night at midnight, a thunderstorm moves and dumps almost an inch of rain. Nothing is protected except for a few pieces of siding. I wake up to the sound of thunder, and walk through the house muttering golfing words. There is an eave, but the siding is removed, exposing the house innards to moisture. The next morning all is okay, but there is more damage exposed that must be repaired. Groan. The men work until the lunch, when the rain returns.

Today the rain continues, the work is incomplete, and it is too rainy for me to finish painting the rail. I guess I’ll read a book instead. At least there is no structural damage, and the water damage will be repaired and the siding replaced, though I will have to paint the siding as well once repairs are complete. Thankfully this isn’t one of those second mortgage repair jobs, it simply an inconvenient one, but aren’t they all. Who knew lifting the corner of some loose paint could stimulate the economy so effectively?

They are rusty brown, stiff, not scratchy, and entirely too long. There’s a loop stitched on the left leg for a hammer and some weird-ass pockets behind the right knee for god knows what. Not exactly CFM pants, but I didn’t buy them for that. I wanted functional wear I could splash with paint, bleach or gouge with a box cutter without fear of ruin. With these, the more decrepit the better. It’s not like I wear them for date night, or to pick up men at the hardware store.

They are for scraping, sanding, priming, painting, plumbing, pressure washing, and eating chinese food. So these pants, well, they haven’t won me any brownie points with my Better Half (or just Other Half, depending upon the moment). Meh. Sexuality and functionality aren’t exactly codependent.

Unplanned repairs required renting a truck at the home improvement store. Someone, who shall remain nameless, has reservations about strapping 16 foot pressure treated timbers to the roof of his precious SUV, but maybe they aren’t completely unfounded…Oh, yeah I remember almost being sucked out of the sunroof when we tied a queen sized mattress to the top. MMMM my bad. The Better Half and the Home Improvement store guy start loading our lumber on the truck. This isn’t one of those standard pick-ups you see good old boys pulling into diners. This is a truck on steroids with a wiener shrinking eight foot cargo bed. I know. What were those yahoos thinking. And the clincher? The bed is only certified to haul 3000 lbs. ‘Scuse me, why did you spend extra money on the engine only to restrict hauling capacity for cargo, who are you a a bank?

As they loaded the lumber, I stood off to the side in my rusty brown non-lycra work pants. That is until the Better Half decided I would be of more use in the truck bed stacking boards. Sure…The bumper and tailgate were taller than factory equipment. The bed was not standard equipment, but industrial grade after market reinforced steel. Great for stability, but sucky for catapulting short legs. I stepped onto the bumper effortlessly, but there was no way my spandex free pants would allow me to raise my leg over the tailgate.

Using my hands to walk along the truck bed, I pulled my body over the tailgate until my feet cleared and resumed shifting lumber to the amusement if my better half and the HI loader dude. All behaved as if nothing unusual occurred.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, the Better Half remarked, “I think I like those pants.”

I decided I should read The Fountainhead. Maybe it was a desire to overcompensate for an inferior literature education, but it could have been the title. Those words: The Fountainhead, held a mystery to be be delved and considered beyond the initial glimpse of article plus compound noun. Obviously, I didn’t have a clue as to the book’s content.

It took weeks to trudge through (that’s what happens when you read at 15 minute intervals), and I won’t trouble you with a synopsis, because in the words of an airplane seatmate from L.A., most people read this when they were “students in like the eight grade”. So you know already, or even if you don’t, it isn’t really important.

The Fountainhead was largely conceived as a vehicle to promote Rand’s philosophy, objectivism and to project the ideal man. So, I wasn’t the target audience…The initial encounters between Dominique Francon and Howard Roark strike me as anything but ideal (and more than a little disturbing), but I will leave those details for the critics and students of comparative literature to sort through.

After I finished the novel, I came away with two impressions.

The first being Ellsworth Toohey was colossal dick, brilliant but a dick is still a dick. Toohey’s subtle manipulation of characters like a deft puppet master, infuriated me off, like a well written character should. He was so wonderfully despicably written that Bagging Tooheys became another euphemism for expunging waste from the litter box.

As for my second impression, maybe objectivism has a limited application. I object to one size fits all philosophy based on principle. I have yet to encounter an ideology, or an ism for the matter, that adequately takes into account the complexity of individuals when proclaiming what behavior is most beneficial to the collective. I don’t agree with Larry Flynt about many things, but I do agree with his quote, “Majority rule only works if you’re also considering individual rights. Because you can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.”

Objectivism’s most logical application is art. Not inclusive of so-called-art that infringes upon the rights of an individual or group. By infringing, I mean unsafe, or unlawful.

Artists are more apt to create their strongest work when they follow their own vision. They may not succeed in creating timeless work, or work that appeals to the masses, but they will produce work that better represents the essence of who they are and their path of growth. Will it make the world a better place? Probably not, but do millions of velvet Elvis paintings, or Thomas Kinky reproductions make us more enlightened?

Artist choose their own paths. I’m not condemning anyone who has made sacrifices to obtain some level of commercial success. All must eat. Freewill permits us to choose. I’m glad some still choose to follow their own stream of conscience even if it doesn’t lead to greatness, because sooner or later it could inspire someone else to transcend the barrier.