From the Department of the Interior

I have trust issues with my water heater. We had many good years together sharing my apartment in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Its grumblings and hissing were the purring of a pet I never had. Its warmth comforted me on foggy summer mornings.

But all relationships have their struggles. I came home one day and discovered that it had burped a small lake in my kitchen. Perhaps it wanted more independence, that it felt tied down as just being an appliance, or that it wasn’t getting enough attention for taking care of the homestead. The plumbers said it was an issue with the vents. I knew something brewed deeper.

I caught it again a week later in an angry hissy fit. The plumbers came back and replaced the pressure gauge and assured me that everything would be fine. But after you are twice soaked how do you back to the happier times? How do you not hear a grumble and wonder if there is a tantrum coming soon? As Al Green would ask: How do you mend a broken valve?

I don’t believe that we are the sum of our possessions, but I do believe that we carry their weight. Whatever interior decorating style I have can be described as "bachelor cluttered." For me a remodel is installing the new version of Microsoft Vista (the Paris Hilton of operating systems – attractive through serious cosmetics, but fundamentally neurotic underneath). My living room is a snake pit of cords, unread magazines, and clothes; all of which do not mix well with water.

A television dominates the far wall, and last week I stumbled into a new program called "Top Design" that is about interior decorators battling for a $100,000. Though I have a certain love for the Bravo shows where talented people compete (Project Runway, Top Chef), interior decorating isn’t exactly something I know quite much about. I started watching the program and saw several of the usual personality types – a couple of bitchy artists, a few theorists who lacked the hands-on-skills, a few blowhards, and some general exceedingly creative people who let their work speak for itself. What I didn’t expect was seeing was someone I knew.

Andrea Keller, one of the contestants, had the same "Ally Sheedy in Breakfast Club" bangs that she had in high school. With her eyes half covered she is just as mysterious now as she was then. As opposed to my very much on the surface ramblings, you always got the sense with her that there were deep wheels turning. Her website bio (http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Design/bio/Andrea ) says that she now speaks twice the number of languages than she has sons, and I do believe that if she were a verb tense she would be the subjunctive with its way of dealing of possible worlds and tricky conjugation.

She needs this sense of possibilities to deal with the program's challenges. For the first contest they gave the designers five objects from a mystery client, and in teams of two they had to turn a blank three-walled space into a sanctuary.

As I cheered deeply for Andrea, I learned how to root for home designers. The first tip was that they were given a $50,000 dollar budget that I really think would have helped with my living room cord problem. Her electronics were putting lights underneath a bed, which I think would make me find a few socks that have been missing for years. http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Design/rate/episode_1/ryan_andrea.shtml

As to picking colors, the secret is to use schemes that no football team would ever use. Andrea had this shade of green that looked like healthy kelp. She used red shelves and a chair to bring contrast and guide your eyes in a circle around the room. It balanced the bed on the left, and the white edges she painted along the edges of the room framed the whole thing like the picture in the television she was given as an inspiration.

The judges thought of it more as a field goal than a touchdown, but it was good enough for her to move on to the next round. I breathed a sigh of relief and was quite content to have something to root for now that football season is over.

I don’t know what the next challenges will bring – are they going to do a dorm room or a taco stand, a dot com space or a post office? Will the new clients be supportive or demanding? But I do know I will be watching on Wednesday nights on Bravo just to see the bravery of someone from high school making it in the world creatively. And if they happen to have a show that helps in dealing with temperamental plumbing I will be cheering hard for a dry tranquility.