On Taste, Loneliness, and Dinosaurs in Houseplants
In 2023, Ruby Thelot wrote an essay called How to Develop Taste. It’s good. The kind of essay that makes me jealous, makes me feel like I’ve been circling around an idea for years but someone else went ahead and nailed it down in clean type. He wrote about how to develop taste: touch things, listen, say yes, archive, love. And I kept nodding along, thinking, yes, yes, yes…
And also…damn, damn, damn.
Ruby wrote the instruction manual. What follows is my confession.
My current state of longing, the detritus of my taste-making over the years, and a half-formed hope that all these objects and quirks will eventually lead me into the kind of community I still seek.
The Fabled Salon I Have Yet to Find
Let me be vulnerable for a second.
I dream of belonging to a group of tasteful weirdos. The kind of people who throw dinner parties dead sober where the real intoxication is conversation. People who argue about philosophy, history, gastronomy, and asstronomy. Not because they want to posture, but because they can’t help it. People who take joy in the tangents. People who get giddy about a footnote.
I know these groups exist; I’ve seen them. Sometimes I try to break in. Sometimes I lurk at the edges. But so far, no luck. I end up outside the window, watching the light spill out, wondering if I’ll ever get the invite.
So I build my own little micro-salon at home, piecing it together out of stuff.
Collaging Taste from Life’s Scraps
My taste has never been sleek or curated. It’s always been collage — layered, messy, half-inside joke.
Wallpaper of survival. I covered my office walls with handwritten letters written by a man who once helped my parents save my life.
Dinosaurs in the jungle. All by himself my dad impulse-bought some plastic dinosaurs from a thrift store, each bearing the name “Andy” in big black sharpie across their chests, and gave them to me as a gift. I was 35 years old. There was no occasion, he just thought I’d like them. He wasn’t wrong. I tucked them into my houseplants, where they still lurk like guardians. Dad himself leaks taste without even knowing it, without ever trying. It just pours out of him unselfconsciously.
Books as confessions. My shelves sag with TASCHEN art books — some lush, some scandalous, some simply oversized monuments to visual indulgence. Next to them: my battered Lonely Planet guides, their spines creased from years of use. Desire and escape, side by side.
This is a glimpse of what my “taste” looks like: messy, personal, unprofessional. It isn’t a mood board. It’s a diary written in objects.
Ruby’s Steps, Filtered Through My Life
Ruby says: “Go out into the world, touch things, ask questions.” I do…but often I just drag the world back into my cave, surround myself with it, and let it haunt me.
Ruby says: “Say yes.” I try. I say yes to strangers, to obscure film festivals, to buying a book on medieval mysticism when I should probably be saving that shelf space for something more practical. Sometimes the yes pays off; sometimes it just leaves me lonelier. But it always feeds the compost heap of taste.
Ruby says: “Archive.” Here, I thrive. I am a dragon curled up on a hoard of scraps: notebooks filled with half-cocked creative projects and world domination schemes, hard drives stacked with experiments and detours. Not everything is finished, but everything has energy.
Taste as Solitude, Taste as Beacon
I think my taste has been both my solace and my isolation. The collections, the objects, the books — they remind me who I am, but they also keep me alone in my own orbit.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe taste begins in solitude before it can be shared. Maybe the dinosaurs in the plants, the oversized art books, the collage of letters — maybe they’re not just my private quirks. Maybe they’re beacons, waiting for the right weirdos to recognize them, to say: oh, you too?
Closing Thought
If Ruby’s essay was a guide to building taste, then this is my counterpoint: taste is not always intentionally built. It leaks out of you, accumulates in corners, grows in the cracks between loneliness and longing.
Taste is what I make of being here, waiting for the dinner party to start, hoping one day I’ll get the knock on the door.
