Nesting, Two Ways

Over the long weekend, I indulged in one of my favorite pastimes: nesting.

For me, “nesting” is the process of making my home more cozy and appealing. I rearranged some furniture, vacuumed, and even journeyed to IKEA for a new bookcase. I love dabbling in interior design. I love mixing color palettes, playing with shapes and materials, and building a mood with the right accessories.

Does it sound silly? It isn’t! Not to me. My physical surroundings directly impact my mental state. A clean, cozy house gives me the psychological breathing room to enjoy and create.

I realized this weekend, after spending a dozen or so hours working on a new website design, that I love “nesting” in my online home, too. Really, it’s the same principles that reign supreme: the marriage of form and function in an aesthetic that reflects my identity. (Rearranging my virtual home is actually a lot more difficult than rearranging my house. Here, I can pick up a table and move it across the room. On the web, moving a table can mean screwing up the whole website.)

Of course, my website is a marketing tool, and can’t just be covered in fu dogs and Aztec ruins and quotes from Buffy. (Well, it could, but I haven’t found a way to do that effectively yet.) In many ways, my online aesthetic matches the clean lines I prefer at home, although I’ve never managed to squeeze an organic, elemental feel out of pixels.

(By the way, searching for a new WordPress theme is exactly like searching for a new home — you have to be able to picture someone else’s house with your own stuff in it.)

So poke around the site if you want, and let me know what you think. Unlike my apartment, this place belongs to you guys as much as it belongs to me. Doubtless I’ll be fiddling with it for days, weeks, and months to come. Heck, I’ve never made it more than half a year with the same design. But you know what? That goes for my physical house, too.

For me, nesting itself is the destination.