I don’t feel pressured to do anything except keep them all alive and, if we go out, make sure everyone is wearing clothes.

Considering that she’s up in New Hampshire, I gotta say those are good goals.

Example 2:
from Closet Buffyholic – what do you do when you’re cross-certified to practice law in six states (let’s not even talk about those bar exams, they were three very dark times) and the guy on the East Coast is trying to give you sh*t about the fact that he had to work through the holidays b/c he doesn’t know you did too?

So, what I ended up saying was “is this a measuring contest? I’ll put my job up against yours I’ll win every day of the week and twice on Sunday.” I think he was kinda taken aback and later he called to apologize for being such a dickweed.

I think she’s right – it’s definitely time for us to plan her vacation(s) this year.

One day, I will be caught up. And on that day, I totally won’t know what to do after that.
I didn’t get nearly as much done over Christmas/New Year’s as I wanted. Part of it was that things came up, & part of it was that after the last year of work and life!stress, I think my body just kind of went, “eff you, we need a break”. I’m not gonna lie, I totally spent about four days slowly plonking through some mindless photo editing and watching season 6 of Grey’s Anatomy on the Roku box that my housesitting location had.

Which now means that I have Normal Time Work to do as well as All The Other Things that I kept putting off because I was going to do them those last two weeks of the year.

Normally, this would be totally daunting for me, and I’d be all crazy-headed about Everything That Needs to Get Done. However, I made a decision last week regarding where I wanted to be living by the summer, and part of being able to do that includes getting myself fully independent financially. Right now, Museum!Co makes up the bulk of my income, with my other clients adding in the part that’s allowing me to stash money into savings and put my life in order. But I am on contract, and the blue-collar pragmatist in me always feels better with a contingency plan.

First thing for me is to get caught up on all my “now” work — everything I have in the pipe needs to be taken care of so it’s either current or done. I put away a good amount of work on it over the weekend and a little more yesterday, but over the next week there may be a night or two like Saturday night, where I just stay up the full 24 hours to push things through. (Sadly, I fear this week that my be tonight, which sucks – I have an erg workout in the morning, and since things are actually going well, I’d like to be able to turn in solid numbers. May try to push it to Wed night.)

Once that’s done, we get to Part the Second, which is the Great Portfolio Update. I haven’t had a chance to fix my own website since I got laid off from Infomercial!Co, which will be two years ago this March. Considering that I’ve put several sites live since then, there’s still a part of me amazed that people offer me work based off what’s online presently. It’s all very, very sad, that site.

After that is Section Trois – namely, working on building out an affiliate network. I’ve been d*cking around with it on & off for the entire two years since getting out of the Infomercial industry, but the truth of the matter is that if you put in the time & are willing to do the SEO & CPA math, all of the smaller parts actually will combine to create a solid little side income. Problem is that after two years out of the industry, I’ll need to go re-up on what’s current knowledge, which is why I think a lynda.com membership may be in order, and the designation of one morning a week to just sit & do tutorials. Good times, good times.

Speaking of learning – what about school, anyway?
After trying to hustle every Friday morning to make it to school on time, I decided to take a different tact to this semester. Thankfully, my last professor was brilliant in that crazy way that most really good artists & teachers are, and I really did learn a lot about figure drawing, as well as have a couple moments where things actually worked, & I was like, “Okay, I do remember how to do this. Okay then. It’s not all gone.” Honestly, one of the nicest moments for me was talking to an older gentleman in the class who’s a professional sculptor by trade & was taking it to basically brush up on his own drawing skills. (Note: nowadays, a sculptor is not an easy thing to be full time, so it’s a fair bet that he’s pretty good at what he does.)

We had just finished a 15 minute session with the model, and he complimented me on my sketch. At the time, I’d chuckled & said something about not being as fast as some of the other people in the class who’d managed to lay down a full figure sketch in the time it had taken me to do from the waist up. He leaned in & said, “Yes, but theirs are all academic, and you have a style. You don’t have to sign it, and someone can tell its yours. It’s lovely. Speed comes with time.”

And it was in that moment that I realized what had been bothering me all quarter about the class. At the time, I’d thought it was that I was behind, and that not having been one of the people who’d immersed themselves in nothing but drawing all the time was hurting me, because I knew that what I was producing was different from everyone else.
It wasn’t until I had that conversation with Sculptor that I realized that what bothered me wasn’t that I was missing something, but that they were. I’m not 17. I’m not going to sit there and gasp in amazement when the professor shows us something new, or clap when he finishes lecturing. (Honestly, I think it may have wigged him out too when they did that, but whatever.) A lot of the program that I would have been on had I gone full time is basics – it’s stuff I now instinctually know, because I learned it…. literally a decade ago, & thus don’t need to stop & take the time to apply it – it’s ingrained at this point. A good amount of those classes are simply like bootcamp – they’re gonna break you down to weed the bad habits out before they build you back up so that everyone starts with the same base skill set, and then send you off into the world to find your personal style.

Problem being, it’s too late – my brain’s been mapped. I’ve already grown up. I’m a person, I have my own opinions, & my own preference to how I like things to be done, so rather than taking everything an authority figure tells me as The Absolute Truth, I tend to pull out what’s useful and apply it as I see fit. The result being that as Sculptor pointed out, rather than trying to start again, I need to simply set about filling in the areas where I’m finding I need to gain knowledge in order to accomplish my own vision as an artist, and in the end, I’ll set up my own cirriculum and accept that there most likely won’t be a piece of paper to prove what I know — my work will be my degree.

With that (and my wacky schedule) in mind, I decided not to take a set class this semester. Instead, I’m signing up for the unlimited workshop pass that they have available, which will allow me to go in & just draw at any of the model sessions that they have, and there’s at least one every day of the week, so I’m going to aim for two to three a week where I go and simply… go. Just draw. Don’t worry about it, don’t think about it, just work on laying something down on paper to increase speed & get more & more practice in. I talked to Professor!Rey, & since he does private lessons as well as teaching with us & at Art Center, I can make an appt to sit down & do a mini-review once every six weeks or so to get feedback & refinement. It’ll probably cost me about the same as if I’d done a structured course, and I really think I’ll just get a hell of a lot more out of it in terms of work progress. So I’ll give that a whirl this spring, and we’ll see.

—————

In an odd way, both of the above sections really are a reflection of my life. Every time I try to get a “proper” education, or structured degree, it pretty much just never works out. Oh, I’ve got my BFA, which gives me the base credentials to walk in the door, but in terms of what I get paid to do – psh, dude. I work on such a different space now than what my degree is actually for that whenever I’ve looked at a higher degree program, there’s always been a part where I ask, “So, can I test out of that part? I’ve already done it.”

Overall, I think that’s what the last year really has been about for me – accepting that my path is simply going to be different than everyone else. It just is. And that’s okay. The truth is, I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll probably never have a “regular” job again – it doesn’t even occur to me to go look for one at this point. Museum!Co is probably as close as I’ll get, or a set-up similar to it. It’s just not how I’m built, or how the universe seems to want me to work. :shrug:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go work on First Thing as outlined above, since none of today’s programming would be possible without the generous financial support of our sponsors…

Music: Crazy for you – Adele (Live from SoHo)

previous adventures

• Why being friends with scientists = awesome
• sometimes it’s an honor just being nominated.
• Then we watch and wait and do nothing but sigh and hope everything is gonna turn out right…

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I had a long chat with Sylvie last week, & amongst other things, I talked to her about Not!Grad School. Based on my conversations & the feedback I’ve gotten from them, I’m pretty sure that sometime around August 1st, I’ll get notification that I can start on October 9th with this year’s class.

The question then being – do I really want to?

Here’s the thing – it’s all day, from 9am – 4pm (3:30 if I make arrangements with the professors to make up the studio time so I can get to the boathouse if I end up coaching juniors this fall) Now, being able to sit & spend three years doing the course of art that I wanted to do sounds dandy, but I have some very harsh realities to deal with:

1. I have to pay the tuition myself because the school isn’t accredited yet, so there’s no federal funding
2. I have to fund the rest of my life at the same time that I’m in school for the same amount of time as a full time job.
3. Eventually, I really do need to get SOME sleep. (No, I actually do mean that)

I was explaining this to Sylvie, and she suddenly stopped said, “God, why are you Americans are so dumb?!”
(Note: Sylvie is French. Occasionally, she’s not just French, she’s very French.)

To which I ventured, “um…I don’t know?”

We then proceeded to have a conversation where she explained to my horribly pedestrian Yankee way of thinking that not everything is in the United States, and perhaps instead of spending three years running myself into the ground for a degree from a school no one’s ever heard of where I won’t enjoy a bit of of because I’ll always be chasing to fill the economic hole of my tuition & life, perhaps it might be better to look at a more concentrated program in Europe for next summer so that I can actually, you know – pay attention to what I’m doing while learning, as well as actually get some time away from my life for a while – kind of a reset button.

:insert heavens opening & beam of light shining down as chorus of angels hit perfect note:

The funny thing about this is that just the week before, my sister & I had been having a conversation about the fact that, other than her honeymoon, we pretty much have never been on vacation. We just didn’t do it as kids – other than family committments, or parent-mandated “educational trips” when we were kids (which were all within driving distance & ruled more by my mother’s neurosis than anything else, so yeah, those were wicked fun) — we just… didn’t. When we were kids, we couldn’t afford it, & when we were old enough, we were sent off to get jobs, after which we all had to pay for our own school, and I guess since we never were in the habit of doing it from when we were kids, neither of us have ever incorporated it into our lives as adults.

So the idea of taking the next year and setting things up so that I can save up, put my affairs in order, and head off for a month or three to kind of explore the world & do something just for me & for the sake of having the experience of it instead of just continuing to try to pay the rent – I can’t tell you how lovely that is to me. It’s going to mean a LOT of prep, and a real push on my part to work & get things in order financially – thankfully, my car will be paid off in June of ’11 (if I can’t manage to get ahead & take care of it a little before) so my expenses will actually go down right before I leave. Since this is LA, there’s almost always someone looking for a short-term sublets and due to the fact that I presently have the best neighbors ever, I know I’ll have people to look in on the place & make sure that nothing gets blown up. (Yay 1049 Improv Troupe!)

In the meantime, I’ll wait to see whether or not I get into Not!Grad School, & then work with them to take at least two classes over the course of the year – probably basic anatomy & also Quick post studios since those would be the basis of any figure drawing study that I would take. I’d also have to finally get my arse in gear & start going to Dr. Sketchy’s when my work schedule allows for it so that I can get lots of practice for pretty cheap.

In order to actually make the cash to be able to do all this, I’m going to have to suck it up & put at least one day aside just for tutorials to bring myself up to date on more backend programming and SEO. More & more clients seem to be asking for things that involve Drupal development, WordPress dev, & SEO work, so it’s time that I hammered down on the things that will actually bring in cash, most likely with a side of HTML5, CSS3, & javascript refresher course. Lynda.com, we’ll be spending a lot of time together.

Of course, I can’t do this alone, so there’s only one thing to do:

Gathering the troops to invade Europe – it’s what Americans do!
Art aside, there’s another awesome aspect to going to Italy or France for the summer – the rowing.

That in mind, I sent Kate a text that just said, “Wanna row in Europe next summer?”

Yeah.. she’s pretty much down. So once we get things in line & I know where I’m going, we’ll take a look at where there is to row around there and have at it, baby — the Euros have way more options than we do in SoCal, and even if I’m just in Europe on a schedule where I can GO to Henley… well honey, it’s Henley the year before the Olympics are in London. That situation’s going to be awesome. Plus since I know a Bronzer or two in merry ol’ Land o’ Eng, we may be able to swing free accomodations for that portion of the adventure, which would be right up there like the guys say during soccer games on Univision – Scoooooooore!

I’ve also tapped Sachiel & Closet B to see if they want to come play, even if only for a week or two – after all, if you’re going to have to get a place to crash for two people in Italy or France, you might as well use it as a halfway house for all your friends, right? Right. Totally.

In the meantime, the upshot of this is that my sorry arse needs to make with the hustle. As Sachiel pointed out to me, “Billable hours equals Europe!”

Music: Dawn – Pride & Prejudice

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So here I am. I’ve had this white canvas sitting outside the front door of my apartment. I know what I want to do with it, it’s just been a matter of… getting there. Getting up. Getting it done.

I’ve tried two times before to sketch out the start. I’ve also painted it over to start again twice, so that should tell you how well things have been going.

Then I realized I’ve just been fucking it up. Earlier this spring, I’d taken a course up at LAFAA, and one of the things that my teacher worked on with us was letting go of the details and just learning to draw from a general feel.

As anyone that knows me might guess, releasing control wasn’t something I immediately took to. For the first time in a long time, I found myself as the slow kid in art class, which really sucked. It wasn’t that what I was doing was bad, exactly, just that it wasn’t.. there was no spark to it. I can’t describe to you what it means to have spark, other than that when you’re creating, either it’s there or it’s not. The work was mechanically correct, but there was no life to it, if that makes sense.

Then, towards the end of the semester, we just started working with pure charcoal dust – no pencils, no real detail available, just a cloth to apply powder to paper, and a round brush to shade and move things around.

Oddly enough, in the complete absence of any tools, I found my spark again. things just… worked. Starting from shadows worked. Concentrating on the darknesses…worked.

That in mind, when I decided what I was going to paint for my first piece, I wanted to do something that would take advantage of that new technique – darkness in focus, shadows telling the story.

What I figured out today was that my philosophy was correct, but I forgot to change my approach.

I’ve been trying to sketch out everything, thinking that I’d just get it all down & darken out what I didn’t need later. Too much information, as Eric would say. I sat in front of the canvas today & decided to just cut out everything I didn’t need.

If you ever watch the show Batman – The Animated Series, you can see that there’s a darkness to the style of animation, as compared to say, Superman: The Animated Series — they’re the same animation house, but the two look very different – Batman is much more noir, a much heavier style. The reason for this is that when they were creating the Batman series, they started with black paper. They started with darkness.

I thought about that today as I sat in front of this blank white canvas. I thought about it, and I ditched my mechanical pencil. (This is a giant step for me – I’ve been known to create entire 18×24″ pieces using a 2mm mechanical pencil. Like I said, it’s possible I have some issues with details.) I ditched my mechanical pencil, went into my office, and got out my willow charcoal.  And then I turned on my projector and started again.

This time, I just went for the shadows. I concentrated on my negative space, and sketched out the shadows.

The result? It didn’t suck. So I took advantage of the inroad, got out some paint for the first time in… at least three years, and I spent an hour laying down the first color layer for the right side of the canvas. It wasn’t awesome, it won’t hang in the Louvre any time soon, but I was struck my how happy I found myself. Not even happy, per se, so much as just… content. It felt good to paint again.

——————————-

In the meantime, I need to work on paying the bills. The part time gig that I’d been hoping for this fall fell through – ironically enough, not because I wasn’t qualified, not because I hadn’t done the work to earn the position, but because someone else has… well, we’ll just call them personal issues. As much as I love my sport, sometimes I really wish that they knew about things like… HR departments, ’cause jesus I’m tired of people’s personal crap — while I suspect I may have managed to at least clear my name on a personal level, I fear my professional chances are hereby classified as “screwed”.

This leaves me with basically two options:
1. Stick around – maybe be a volunteer and have to putter around, never getting any further than I am now.

2. Save my pennies and move. Get outta dodge & go somewhere that I won’t have to be the one that pays for other people’s inability to deal with their own fucking emotional immaturity.

There are other places. I could go to San Diego – I know there would be a place for me there, that I’d be welcome. They have the facilities to do what I’d want to accomplish, and I know I’d get paid for it. I could go to grad school – we’re pretty sure I have 5 years of NCAA eligibility, and a rower with 4 years experience and a 1.51 split on a 2k is never an unwelcome thing.

I just… I don’t want to leave. I love my team that I row with. I built my team. I’d hate to leave them. I loved coaching. I really did, and while the logical adult in me understands the need to go somewhere else, to help another team win, my overdeveloped sense of loyalty hates the idea of it.

But before that, I need to take care of me. Which is probably going to mean getting a crappy part time job in retail or Starbucks or something so that I don’t have to keep pulling unemployment – or at least to get myself that much closer to getting off unemployment. The freelance work I have now is good, and it’s there, but it’s not enough for me to be fully independent, and that’s what I need to work on.

So, I’ll start applying – I hear the Whole Foods near me needs people, and my next door neighbor is a manager at Urban Outfitters, he says they need overnight stockers, which would be nice – if I’m going to work retail, it’d be nifty to have a position that doesn’t actually involve customers. I really don’t want to go back to an office – if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned that I’ve lost all tolerance for the 9-to-5 game.

In the meantime, I’ll also work on my affiliate blog – I made enough of the pages at my last employer, it’s not like I don’t know how it’s done. See if maybe the internet can’t help me out a bit as well.

Mostly, I’m just tired of this shit. I’m tired of games, and I’m tired of trying to figure out what’s going on underneath what’s going on. I don’t understand why people can’t just sit the fuck down and talk about shit – why they need to make everything so complicated. I wish it wasn’t that way. I wish I could trust. I wish… I wish I hadn’t learned that in the end, seven is just like eight.

But none of that matters right now. What matters right now is dollars and cents. What matters is getting myself free of depending on anyone else. What matters is making sure that I’m okay, because I have learned without a doubt that no one else is going to help me do that.

Today, I had a small victory – I painted. Tomorrow, I go to look for a job, and begin the fight again.

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