thescratchpost.com

Dariush has been farting around LA for a few years now. After getting a masters in animation at USC fim school, he began by working at places like Sony Hi Def, South Park, and Rhythm & Hues to keep the USC student loan man happy. He is currently working as a staff animator in Maya for In Sight Pix in Venice during the days, and teaches 3d Studio Max, Maya, and After Effects at The Art Institute of LA, Gnomon, and UCLA Extension. He is bald and likes talking to small furry animals.

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What’s more annoying than blinking LEDs and the whirring fans of your home office computer when you’re in bed trying to go to sleep, after a twelve hour fix spent slouching over your keyboard, thanks to an ungrateful and poorly paying client? Well, that’ll be your fax modem going off — right when you’re about to put that special romantic move you read about in Maxim on the hot date that you managed to somehow get into your bedroom.

Boom, you blew it; she’s out the door and you’re left with a half bottle of Bully Hill red wine and a new set of changes that your client insists you take care of by the next morning. Nice luck Romeo. Try getting an office next time.

Well, easier said than done. As life gets increasingly sophisticated, and work encroaches further into our personal lives, it has become virtually impossible not to have an office at home. Ideally, that notion of a home office should sound like a paradox, but more and more, we find ourselves pushing away our home stuff to make yet another 19 square inches of room for some big ass monitor. And end up resenting our living spaces as a result.

The thing that hurts more than losing all that square footage is the psychological space it takes up in your head. All of the office crap that typically goes into a working office — the PC, the printer, the modem, the manuals, the books ad nauseum — not only manages to spread itself around your living space, but tends to crawl under your skin after time. This is especially true when you have little or no physical barrier between your home and office. You wake up in the morning and that pile of papers beckons you. You go to bed at night and the last thing you see before your close your eyes is the vision of your monitor shutting down. And if you’re not careful, you’ll end up living in your office, and not working in your home.

The most flagrant infiltration is when the office is set up smack in the middle of the same space in which one would sleep. And man, that straight out sucks. If you can help it, by all means keep those infernal office machines out of the bedroom. There’s nothing more annoying than watching red and green LEDs as you try to count sheep after a grueling day. Along with the constant hum of the PC keeping you from your REM, there’s not much you can do to keep from losing your religion. And then there’s just the mere sight of “work” to instigate tension.

Sometimes, though, there’s no avoiding the bedroom home office, a fact which I know all too well from experience. In the cramped living I made for myself while trying to get through an entirely too expensive graduate school, I knew that I needed a clear separation of work and home, to keep myself from climbing up a clock tower with a rifle. But with space being limited as it was, and my roommate difficult as he was, I had no choice but to keep my office in my bedroom, just a few feet from my bed.

It was a matter of weeks before I thoroughly resented my own bedroom and found myself sleeping on my roommate’s cheesy black faux leather couch in the common area. It was like sleeping at an airport terminal the day before Thanksgiving; I had to do something, and quick. My roommate was getting entirely too passive aggressive in his discontent with my newfound bed on his nasty plastic couch. But aside from moving out entirely, or allowing my roommate to suffocate me in my sleep, I didn’t see a whole lot of options: either pack in the office, or get used to sleeping with it three feet from my face. I wasn’t ready to do either.

Luckily, one hot Burbank day, while slurping a soda and wasting time in Ikea, I stumbled over my solution. Literally. My foot found the end of a Japanese-ish paper and wood room divider that had been jutting out into the walking aisle of the bedroom section. And there it was right in front of me, the answer to my woes. I felt like an idiot, and not just because I hadn’t been watching where I was walking. Having been an architect in a previous life, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t come up with the idea for a room divider earlier. So I sucker punched this elderly woman and grabbed her cart, then ran to Ikea’s stock area to stock up on some cheap Ivar shelving and one of those room dividers. I was reticent to fork out what little cash I had, but it would be more than worth it in the long run.

Back at home in my apartment, I quickly set to work on creating the much-needed physical barrier that would definitively separate my bedroom from my office, to cut the blight of it all. To begin, I separated out everything that didn’t require immediate access, like my printer supplies, and shoved it all into the linen closet. With just the true necessities left to organize, I could pack the rest of the contents of my home office onto the modular shelving. I set up my modular shelving to provide a small cubby space between it and my corner desk. In that space, I placed my PC’s noisy tower. The little nook cut the noise from this monster considerably, and kept it out of the way of my clumsy feet and easily bruising toes. I ran the medusa of wires coming out of the back of the CPU up the back of the shelving using duct tape, then coiled up the excess to keep it neat and tidy. Out of sight, out of mind.

Just having done that helped out quite a bit, actually, but I had a few more improvements to make. After clearing my desk top of everything that reminded me of work, I replaced my keyboard with a cordless one. This way, I could stow the keyboard behind my desk when I wasn’t using it, freeing up the desk top for other uses. Now I could now sit at my desk to read a book or write a letter in peace, without having to wrangle with wires or shove stuff aside.

With shelves installed and deskspace organized, I was ready for the final step: separating the office from the bedroom with that Scandinavian-made, Asian-inspired room divider. By day, I leaned the screen up against the wall, behind my Ivar shelves and out of the way. But at night, ready for bed after hours of getting my ass beat by pre-teens on Battle.net, the divider would come out in its full glory, to cut off my office corner entirely from the rest of the room.

I can’t tell you what a relief that screen turned out to be, more so than the newly organized shelving, even more than the newfound quiet. Until then, I hadn’t been fully aware of what a visual and psychological burden it had been for me to be staring at my office all the time. It was amazing that these small changes could have such a huge impact on how I now felt about the space. And best of all, I realized, the transformation had been an utterly easy project to complete.

Finished at last with my renovations, I removed my bedding from my roommate’s couch, and returned to the bedroom. And there I stood, like Alexander the Great, over my new bedroom conquest. I had finally regained my bedroom as a place of rest, relaxation and sexual rejection.