Curse You Cable Modem!

I’ve just tried to have a reasonable conversation with computer’s DSL modem, a conversation which ended with the modem telling me–and I quote–to “go to Hell!”  Therefore, this blog post telling you about it will not be very long (and of course there will be no pictures this time) because I only have a few brief moments to sneak a few sentences on to the Internet before the modem discovers me, gets itself into angry snit, and tries to strangle me with its USB cables.  I see a furtive phonecall to the ISP in my near future.  Let the Internet withdrawals begin!

Trauma in the Sea of Japan

Before I first officially enrolled in college those several years ago, I thought I would read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I was in my early twenties then and, recalling now, I’m not fully sure why I wanted to read it. Perhaps, I thought that reading such a dense book would be a mental challenge that would somehow prove my worthiness to attend college. College had been a much-hoped for but still unattainable goal at that point in my life, and I had some insecurities about my ability to “cut it.” Work was remorselessly grinding the human spirit out of my body with its incessant demands for more circuit boards, and its general lack of concern about any personal need I had was demoralizing. Even though I had some measure of responsibility, the bottom line seemed to be that I was a meat-robot needed to press buttons, feed machines raw materials, and enforce humiliating human resource policies that I hated. The act of reading Moby Dick at the point was more important than the book itself. The act of reading Moby Dick hinted at the promise of a better life that would allow me a measure of control and therefore dignity.

So, after my evening shifts at the factory, right before falling asleep in the sleeping bag on my bedding pallet (I had no bed at the time), I would read a one or two chapters in the early morning dark of 3 or 4 a.m. I admit that, initially, I skipped over some of the middle chapters that I found especially boring. I didn’t understand Melville’s metaphysical point of describing the nature of whales or the natural world. Yet, the description of the harpooneers and the process of nineteenth century whaling was very interesting, and the end of the book was exciting. And, going with the popular interpretation, which I must have absorbed from the mythology and popular culture surrounding the book, I saw Captain Ahab as a man whose faulty pride and inability to give up his own anger towards the whale was the reason for his self-destruction. And that was that. Moby Dick was an adventure novel with a cautionary tale against “monomaniacal” obsessions and prides.

In college, I was reintroduced to Moby Dick in a couple of my literature classes. By the end of my senior year at my undergraduate college, I wrote a paper about the book that won me second place and one hundred dollars in an essay contest. Not only had I gained a new understanding of the book, I was developing a new language for talking about it in terms of literary high criticism. Moby Dick was Dark Romanticism, with a captial ‘R.’ For me, Moby Dick had developed from a mere adventure novel into a metaphysical exploration of the nature of good and evil. The instructors and professors would frequently try to convince us students that book was arguing that the natural world was a morally dangerous place that inevitably lured people to evil, but on that point, I was unconvinced. Instead, I saw the book as an exploration of character that was less about proving a point about world’s evil and more about one man’s (Ishmael’s) search for the enduring truths about God and his world through the agency of other people, the sea, and his own heroic-or-not actions.

And then, I went to Graduate school where Moby Dick was again discussed. I was finding that certain middle-aged men, the professors, really enjoyed the book for its masculine adventurousness and were using the book as a mirror of their own thinly disguised and unconscious attempts to self-aggrandize themselves as heroes. Like the man called Ishmael, they were on a heroic quest to definitively explain the world and the way it worked, only instead of through whaling, they were going to do it through high literature. I suppose this is why I enjoyed my classes with the professors (who were mostly women by the way) who were intent on exploring or moderating a good conversation rather than making pronouncements. I am not sure that I gained any deeper understanding of the book itself, as by this point, it had become familiar. Grad. School, it seemed to me, was about taking a few minor threads from certain books in the literary canon and trying to spin entire blankets out of them. Still, even with my frustration with this improbable process, I enjoyed the seminars on the book. I had my favorite chapters, my favorite characters and scenes, and had gleaned a variety interesting facts about the book, its author, and the period in which it was created. Part of the appeal could also have been Melville himself. As I saw it, he was an earnest, if somewhat tragic figure forced to earn a living as a customs officer at the end of his life. Hawthorne seemed too mainstream and a little phony, Poe was an adept drunk and liar, and Thoreau was a weirdo camping out in his own backyard trying to talk to trees.

And, now, with my academic literary life over, I find myself thinking about Moby Dick again. Thankfully, these thoughts are no longer encumbered by the high literary theories or concepts of Deconstruction, Dialectical Marxism, Perfomativity, Phenomenology, Signs, Signifiers, or Signifieds. Instead, I think of Captain Ahab. Rather than a villain who destroys himself and others over his foolish pride, I see him as a much more tragic figure. He was whaling in the sea of Japan, essentially doing his job in order to earn a living. There, he has an accident and a whale, the white whale, rips his leg from his body. I imagine the trauma and pain of such a physical assault on the body and try to think about what that might be like to experience that. To feel your leg being pulled from your body, to feel the fear and panic of the event as it happens, to feel the fear of instant death, or the worry of a lingering one, to be utterly afraid of leaving the world and your family before you’re ready to linger for weeks just moments away from dying, to be fitted with a wooden leg replacement is nearly unimaginable.

And, often, it seems to me, for every physical trauma there is a deeper mental anguish that is at least twice as worse. The body always heals much more quickly than the mind. So, in light of this, what else was Ahab to do? He was a wounded man desperately searching for a way to absolve his trauma. He, of course, thought that he should hunt the whale and kill it. But, emotional traumas aren’t as easily resolved and are never, ever purged. The challenge is not striking back at the embodiments of our pain but figuring out how to coexist and cope with the tragedy if it. And yet, how was Ahab to know this? He did the best he could. In a sense, Ahab’s real death did not occur when he was dragged below by the whale, but when he suffered an emotional trauma that completely devastated him. The time between is Ahab as a ghost, a shade that represents what he used to be to others and only emptiness to himself. He is the present absence that captains the ship unswervingly to the death that began in the sea of Japan.

And, I suppose, for me, that is Melville’s message: figuring out how to live with the pain that tries to destroy us, figuring out how to bear and endure the traumas that we encounter in life without sinking under to our own self-destruction. This where the application art to our own lives come in, which is for me, the message of literature: how do we learn about ourselves in a way that betters us individually and our condition as a society. So, speaking personally for just one example, I have a genetic tendency to depression that I have to figure out how to coexist and cope with. Before, I suppose I’ve always sort of thought about my depression as something to cure and be completely rid of. Instead, I figured I’ve learned that I need to manage it properly, so I am master of it rather than it being master of me.

Turkey Trot

Wednesday morning, as I was driving into school I nearly ran over a group of four or so turkeys. Yes, I said turkeys. And yes, I know it sounds ridiculously improbable. I mean, what on earth were a group of turkeys doing wandering out in the middle of the road, just one day away from Thanksgiving? Escaping? Getting one final look around at the world before accepting their honored place in the Thanksgiving oven? At the time, I felt a small panic expecting an impending explosion of turkeys into a catastrophe of feathers, but I managed to recover enough to find that all of the turkeys, largely unconcerned about their near death experience, were in tact and casually meandering from the road to the field nearby. After puzzling over such questions, I figured that either the turkeys escaped somehow, or that someone had intentionally let the turkeys out in order to give their surroundings the appropriate decorative touch for the holiday. Wild turkeys aren’t native to our area. The turkey episode actually helped in way because I had hardly any sleep the night before, so the brief terror I felt and the attendant adrenaline helped me feel more awake.

As if you couldn’t tell from the previous posts, the last couple of weeks of school have been pretty stressful and unhappy, primarily because I had fallen behind on some important projects. I spent almost eighty hours! working on just one in a period of only a week and a half. I know this because, as part of the project, I had to keep track of the time I spent on it. It may not sound like so much, but remember, this was in addition to the other work and obligations I had for other classes.

Concerned about my ability to pass the class with my being behind in my work, I talked with the instructor which helped to clarify which homework had priority. The instructor indicated that while the late work will have an effect on my grade, it isn’t as disastrous as I had imagined. Her concern was that I continue to come to class despite being behind in work. At least four students have dropped the class, two of which have dropped the entire program. Attrition is showing more and more, but on the plus side, the less people who complete the program means there is less competition from my design peers.

And, while I still feel unhappy about my prospects for a good grade in the course, I feel much better about passing the class as a whole. “Passing” this class is my academic goal right now. I can work on “passing and exceeding” in my future courses, and I feel confident that, in those future courses, I can better avoid the mistakes I made during this term. Today, I even managed to impress the instructor and the other students with the work we did in class, which was nothing more than construction paper cut-outs of small icons, but it felt good to get praise nonetheless.

The stress will ramp up next week (Dead Week) I am sure. If I had Adobe Creative Suite Three at home, I would be able to do much better with the homework I think. It’s easier to work in bursts of varying length at home rather than try to hammer out marathon sessions in the computer lab. It might be better if I lived closer to the lab, it takes me an hour to drive to school one way, without turkeys of course. Tomorrow though, I set aside all of these concerns and will focus riding out the chaos of family Thanksgiving with as much equanimity as is possible to manage in a house full of crazy people.

Knitting Sea Chanteys

Well, as if you couldn’t tell, I’ve been a little stressed and depressed lately, mostly having to do with school and my life being in general disarray. While the threads of depression are still woven into my spine to some extent, I think I am over the hump on this latest bout of it. Wednesday will be the next day I will have to prove myself, so tomorrow and Tuesday will be full of work.

Today, I slept in for as long as I could, 11:00 a.m., before I had to raise my dizzy head from the pillow and get in the shower for work. Work was largely uneventful except for the appearance of creepy man skulking about the back of the shop. I only found out about him after he left, but I did make sure to tell everyone to let me know if he showed up again. It wasn’t anything he did; he just gave everyone a bad vibe.

I guess I was preoccupied with the boss’ computer. I noted her firewall was down, so I called her to ask about it. She explained that her Ebay account was hacked because of a weak password, and when she was corresponding with someone from Ebay to sort out the mess, took her firewall OFFLINE!?! to send them an e-mail. Frankly, I was a flabbergasted! The closest analogy I could think of would be if you were driving along the highway, saw a police barricade up ahead, and instead of slowing to a stop–the reasonable thing to do in said situation–you slammed the gas pedal completely against the floorboard hoping you could jump the gaping chasm ala Dukes of Hazzard! I tried to not sound too incredulous and consequently make her feel unduly defensive, but I don’t think I succeeded. I did forget to write my time down, so I hope the boss catches my mistake before the checks go out. I will have to tell her about it soon.

After dinner, I settled in to watch television and surf the internet for cartoons, art inspiration, and illustration tips, something that I do more often these days as I seek to improve my skills. For example, Little Dee is one of the comics that I occasionally surf, and it is a pleasant read, especially seeing it develop as it has. I think Chris Baldwin, the guy who draws it, is really talented, and I missed meeting him at his booth at the Portland Stumptown comic fest this year. Little Dee, for those of you who don’t know, is about a silent little girl who lives in the forest with a bear named Ted, a dog named Blake, and vulture named Vachel. One of Vachel’s hobbies is knitting, which helps to explain the following bit of inspired creativity, a knitting sea chantey!:

We Rogues of Wool

I have never posted a video before, but this was too good to pass up. One of the reasons that I think it works so well is that the characters are so strong and developed. And, somehow, the combination of characters really manages to evoke a childlike sense of the world and the overall comfort of creation that children seem to feel. It was a nice boost and uplift in what has been a dreary past week or so.

Odd Contemplations

I’ve been in a odd contemplative mood for most of the last several days. The summer has now largely evaporated, and the memories of my doing anything substantial during this time are like steam vapors that drift far away from, and well beyond, my grasp. Somewhat hibernating within my darkened bedroom watching re-runs of the various Star Trek incarnations or fighting digital monsters in the fantasy lands programmed inside my laptop, I’ve effectively isolated myself from the outside world. And the sense of dull dissipation I’ve developed is like an inertia magnet that only attracts more void, more nothing.

Lately, most of my interesting adventures take place at night when I am deep asleep. For example, in one of my recent dreams, I am traveling through a town with a shallow river running directly through its center. While I am in the act of crossing it, I notice that the river washes over main street and somehow runs into a distant cavern far below. (Perhaps this is an unconscious echo of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” especially the bit about “where Alph, the sacred river, ran :: In caverns measureless to man.”) I manage to make it across the river, only to immediately find myself on a broad wrap-around porch of a wooden Victorian home. It is now dark outside, and I am locked out. I search around the edges of the front door and front windows for some way in, but am unable to make any entry. I begin to hear something, a rustling of activity, below the porch. Leaning over the steps in a brief investigation of the noise, a little girl, just a toddler, appears with large round eyes that are mysteriously shining with an eerie and watery luminescence. The little girl is scared, lost, and has been crying. Moved, I gather her up into my arms, holding her, and she clutches at my side with a strong monkey-like grip. She is still scared, but now a bit mollified that I am taking care of her. I awake soon thereafter.

I’ve given up on trying to interpret the symbology of my dreams during this period of odd feeling. It is too much work to delve below their surface meanings for obscure insights into my evolving character. But this is not to say that unanalyzed dreams like these do not also have a mysterious effect. It is like being scratched in the unconscious part of your mind: you may feel it’s presence during your awareness of it while simultaneously awaiting for the sensation to vanish just as briefly as it appeared. I can still feel the itch of this dream somewhat, but I am also sure that, in another two or three days, I’ll probably have forgotten it.

School starts on Monday, so this afternoon, to avoid the inevitable crowds, I bought the yearly parking permit. I am not sure what to expect from this next round of classes as my expectations for myself are under heavy reorganization. In the past, especially with regard to my own assessment of my potentialities, I had been a perfectionist expecting nothing short of total mastery, total success at the many things I attempt. But I am slowly learning that I have often been too hard on myself; the effect of which, when I am unable to meet my own impossible standards, has been to leave plenty room for me to berate myself or allow others to treat me poorly. (After all, if I feel like a failure, then I am unlikely to challenge you when you treat me as if I really were a failure.) Knowing this, I am trying to unlearn unrealistic patterns of perfection, but I have yet to develop a healthy alternative the holds the same motivation that perfection had. Will I always miss not having been able to get a Master’s degree in English Literature? Can I feel the same way about a career in graphics that I once did for becoming a professor of literature?

The answers to these questions are not unrelated to my thoughts about perfection, answers that are still shrouded for me. I suppose this leaves me, essentially, in the odd mood I mentioned in the beginning of this post. When you come right to the bottom of this whole thing, I feel confused–a sense that I believe I may have been feeling for awhile now. But perhaps, this feeling of confusion is also a progress of some kind, especially if I remember that, only a year or two ago, I was coming from a place of feeling totally sure about all the wrong things. Certainty leaves too much room for blind spots.

P.S. It has been ten days since this year’s fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attack in New York. I admit that I have been too self-absorbed to think about such things lately, but today, while searching through my lists of blogs that I read regularly, I stumbled on this web documentary. It is the thought-provoking account of that attack five years ago from eight professional photographers who were in New York when the attack happened and the towers fell. Towards the end, it perhaps gets too political for some, but if you have the time, I would highly recommend seeing it. Also, if you have the time, you may want to listen to a cab driver’s first day driving her cab. It is has a similar connection to the events of 9/11, and happens to be from one of my favorite blog authors.

Pigs and Dreams

I’ve heard that some people have a hard time remembering their dreams: these people will either say either they don’t dream at all or the last dream they can remember having was several years ago. On the other hand, I can remember my dreams fairly easily. I might even have two or three memorable dreams in one night, which to me, seems like a lot. But at the very least, I will have a dream that I can remember about once every week.

This last dream that I had the other night was fairly disturbing. There was a very large pig underneathe a queen-size bed. It had lived there for several years, stuck and very probably in pain, but I had only just discovered it. Initially, I tried to feed it placing my hand near its mouth to feel its weak bite, but this was not working. I pulled the mattress and the box spring off to the right, leaned them against the wall, and released the pig from its imprisonment. Before it’s snout was the only thing visible, but now the whole pig came into view. It was stuck in a metal frame and looked entirely hideous. I’ll spare you the exact details of the visual, suffice it to say that the pig looked disgusting because it was covered with sores and wounds. Still, I felt pity for it and tried to bring it back to health after releasing it from its abusive confinement.

The dream has stayed with me for a few days, and the literary critic in me cannot resist trying to sort out and interpret the metaphors. In a way, (that I will leave completely unanalyzed), the dream is symbolic of a very rough two-week period for me. I have been eating too much, sleeping irregularly, and spending a lot of time alone. I’m going to be changing a few things soon that will help me come out of the funk that I find myself in, but at the moment, I am just trying to maintain some positive habits that will supposedly pull me into a better place. Despite popular cliches, staying still can sometimes be a type of progress.

The Unknowing Burden

Depression is an ugly hulking thing that follows you around like a shadow, and the longer it stays with you, the harder it seems to get rid of it. Its ethereal tendrils seep slowly into your being tightening, minute by minute, its tangle of roots around your bones. You become comfortable with it’s hot and weary presence, and unless you purposely try to notice it, it melts into your subconscious, disappears from view, and settles on your shoulders to become the unknowing burden.

It’s this seemingly disappearing aspect of depression that sometimes confuses me. In the popular imagination, one usually thinks of someone with depression as a person who feels “sad” all of the time, of someone who carries grief around with them like a candle in the overwhelming dark, of someone who is always two seconds away from crying. That would be an “in-your-face” type of depression. But, for me anyway, that is not how it most often shows up. Instead, I sleep a lot during the day when I can (naps for two or three hours), and then at night, I can’t seem to fall asleep until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Depression also causes me to think a lot about my life in terms of mistakes I have made and opportunities I have missed, like the “wasted” money on graduate school, or my failed relationships. I don’t feel like eating much, and when I do eat, it is usually only to fill my belly. I get headaches frequently. I almost always feel like I need a nap even if I am wide awake.

In brief, I feel like the mayor of failure-town. But these are not grief-inspiring thoughts as much as they appear to be evident “facts,” and in the false guise of “facts,” these thoughts mask the depression. The real fact, objectively speaking, is that my brain does not make serotonin like a healthy person, so these negative thoughts of failure have some roots in a very physical cause. I have the hardest time getting my mind around this concept, but there it is. Just as a person with a broken leg would have some trouble walking, a person with messed up serotonin levels has trouble being “not-depressed.” I’ve been in a depressed phase during the last week or so.

Actually, I guess I would have to say that it has been more than a week judging by how often I have posted on my blog, but this week has been particularly bad. I’ve not met many of my goals and I have spent more than a few hours in bed during the middle of the day. I am trying to change that around, and I would have to say that I am making a little progress. After all, I am writing this blog post rather than telling myself how I should be doing something other than watch television. I also did some cleaning up by removing a lot of clutter and generally making things look nice.

Another thing that I managed to do just for myself was accidentally go to a Civil War Re-enactment. It was an accident because I had meant only to go to a State Park and possibly go on a hike in a natural setting. I looked up some nearby parks and made my choice, but when I got there, I found that there was a large reenactment group doing their thing. I took some pictures of the battle behind the “Confederate” side of things and then looked around at the various displays after the faux fighting was over. It was a nice distraction away from my various problems at the time. I further distracted myself by making a little comic about the experience. I think that the next two weeks are going to be better for me personally. I am already feeling good enough to a blog post, right?  So, I think I have reason to hope for the future. Until next time.

The End of the First Year

Tomorrow is the last day of my first year in the Graphic Arts program. Okay, so they are calling this program “Visual Communications,” arguing that designers do more than graphics, but whenever I stop to think about the businesses that buy the type of design services I am learning, I can’t imagine a single one of them wants to hire someone called a “visual communicator.” It sounds too damn new-agey, too esoteric, like something akin to voodoo. If I were a business owner trying to sell my product or service, I would want a graphic artist.

In my current plan, I’ve got two more years of this graphic arts program to complete. This next year is the one that I’m looking forward to because I’ve gotten beyond the silliness of introductory undergrad courses. (While some freshman kid straight out high school may not realize some college assignments are busy-work, a hoop for instructors to feel justified giving the final grade, I’ve done so many I can see them a mile away.) But now the appetizers are done, we finally start getting into the meat of the program. And then, I think I will be better able to judge if this program is going to get me where I really want to go, or if I should start in another direction.

Anyhow, I’ve spent the last couple weeks finishing up final projects. On friday, I went out for a mini-hike near some forest falls I know. This trip was a little different from the ones I have taken in the past though. Those previous trips were for pure pleasure, but this one was a little about business. Our final project in photography class is to create a shampoo ad. I figured that I would take a picture of two shampoo bottles near the waterfalls to convey the idea of fresh and pure. It was not the best pictures I have ever taken, but then again, they are not the worst either.

To setup, I had lie on the very edge of the water and hold the camera as steady as possible. Even still, my pants got a little wet. Also, while the idea of a forest stream and waterfall conveys the idea of cleanliness, the reality is that both are pretty messy places. For instance, the mud was thick and it hardly ever dries out cause it is always shaded by the trees, so it was tricky keeping dirt off the shampoo bottles while simultaneously trying to keep the camera dry.

The above picture is from that trip. While I was wallowing in the mud trying to get a perfect picture of a shampoo bottle, a man taking his cat for a walk in the woods came up to the bank behind me. It is not everyday someone takes a cat for a walk, so I asked him if I could take its picture. In retrospect, I should have asked him a lot more questions: what was the cat’s name, does he take his cat for a walk often, or even what did he do for a living. However, he seemed painfully shy (makes sense in weird sort of way), so I just made a random comment about how I like taking pictures of nature scenes like the falls.

The Barn Trip

This morning started out with a minor walking trip through the dewy grass in my sandals up to the big red barn to recover the small pet carrier that is stored there.  Normally, I don’t visit the barn that often; and I don’t think I have ever been in it at 6:30 in the morning.  If I am not digging out a half of coffee can’s worth of chicken feed from the barn’s feedbox as the substitute “farmer” in place of my dad,  I really have no call to be in that dark and dusty place.  But this time I needed the pet carrier because the cat (the cat which I never had any intention of owning in the first place by the way–long story) was going in for her operation.  This vet trip gained particular urgency in the last couple of weeks because the cat had been seen cavorting with the stray tom who lives in the woods behind the barn.  Not a good sign since the last thing I need is another set of kittens: one set was already too many.  In any event, I managed to pack her off into the carrier and have her driven to the vet.  The cat is currently spending the night there after having been spayed just this afternoon.  The other cat, much too young to be neutered yet, has decided to stop being a pain and settle down after an hour of trying to sit on my keyboard, assuredly some kind of feline entertainment.

The only other reason beside the pet carrier or chicken feed that might be cause for me to be in the barn is the fact that some of my old things are in its upper loft.  These things comprise about eight or so boxes and are mostly filled with old textbooks or schoolwork scribbled down in notebooks from my undergraduate days of about six or so years ago.  I tell myself that I should move them to prevent any more of the thick barn dust from settling on it, or to prevent the inevitable dew from wetting that dust and caking those papers with a fine mud thereby warping the pages.  Probably, I will move it sometime in the summer.

Still, even though I was a little tired, I braved the rickety ladder and opened up a couple of boxes to retrieve six of my notebook journals that I had written during those early college days.  Back then, I fancied myself as a writer of sorts, so I included everything that one who considers themselves a “writer-to-be” in those journals: poems, phrases that I thought interesting at the time, a few overheard conversations, or memories of things I had done.  I had been to a few author readings, writer presentations, or library events where writing was concerned, and invariably, aside from questions about how to get an agent, the speakers mentioned that the best way to develop “the craft” of writing was to keep a journal.  After all, artists have their sketchbooks, so writers should have their journals.  Most of my journals were written before I had a blog of any kind, and in that regard, if I had never created a blog, I would probably have filled up a lot more than just these six.

I still keep a written journal to write things down when I don’t have a computer on hand to type something off real quick, but mostly the blog serves most of my creative writing purposes.  I’ve only had a chance to read one of these older journal and already two things stand out pretty clearly.  One, my writing was pretty terrible–overwrought and whiny–which I have to admit, I can still be guilty of, but trust me, it was far, far worse back then.  There is a lot of awkward complaining about being lonely and trying to be a “good person,” which likely meant that I was really, really, really lonely and had more than my share of self-esteem issues.  The second thing I noticed was how, back then, my writing was less focused on my personal problems.  I suppose I use my writing more these days as a way to explore my emotional life and sort out how I feel about things or my past.  Even though the old writing is terrible, I miss the creativity it expresses.  I think I should go back to writing more poems.  A few of my undergraduate professors had mentioned that I had some talent for it, but then again, that is the story of my life: potential that doesn’t seem go anywhere.  Perhaps this is my basic personality, but I sure hope not.  I’d really like to be able to have accomplishments to be proud of rather than a truckload of regrets for things I haven’t done or things that didn’t pay off with the results I really wanted.

Gaining Ability

I only got about four and half hours of sleep last night, but despite that, I managed to get to school on time this morning without frantically speeding down the highway. Somehow, I also managed to finish up a lot of previously incomplete work during the afternoon. Energy and motivation had taken a vacation during the past couple of weeks, but surprisingly, for some unclear reason, I found them again. I just have a few more unfinished projects to complete in the next couple of days.  I need to print up a few photography assignments on the school’s fancy Epson printer tomorrow, and I further need to complete a couple of overdue life drawing assignments by 11:30 a.m. It’s doable, and I am still confident I can get it all done.

By 5:30 p.m. tonight, I was ready to quit working on assignments and begin the trip home. It takes an entire hour from the school parking lot to my front door at home, so the trip is a bit of hassle, but today’s sunlight and light road traffic made the trip home almost pleasant. Between stoplights and the ever-present muffler fumes from the other cars, I had time to muse over how I’ve really gained some real artistic knowledge these past few months and, while I definitely need to practice my skills a lot more, began to reflect on how that knowledge is getting incorporated into my current work.  I only have to look over at some of the beginning Art students struggling with their drawings and designs to see how I have gained an ability that they have yet to develop.  I have noted in myself a tendency to be overly insecure about my own abilities, especially as that may relate to a future paying career.   Self-esteem, anyone?  While I am not sure that being gratified at noting my abilities above the other students is necessarily a healthy thing, it does go a little way to maintain my confidence in myself.

But back to the four hours sleep, my being up way too late was my own fault for not turning off the television at 11:00 p.m. like I had planned.  Cartoons and late night comedy proved to be too compelling.   The afternoon nap I took yesterday did not help matters either. The cats like to zoom around at midnight anyway, so my being up late accommodated their schedules if not my own. They seem to like to have an admiring audience to their feats of destructive acrobatics, but don’t seem to understand that I wind up watching more out of concern for the objects they invariably knock over than any admiration for their capacity to leap from the bookcase to the windowsill across the room in a rainbow-like arch.  I am sure that there are more than a few things under the bed that either one of the cats has pushed or carried away there than I really care to know about: a dusty sock, a toy mouse, a deck of cards, or a forgotten scholarship application for instance.

My graduate school life of a couple of years ago seems like a million miles away today, but I can still feel its lack in my life.  I want to clutch its memory with a granite squeeze and press it into the firmer side of my heart, but it seems less like granite and more like a drifting summer smoke chasing its way out of my hands whenever I grab at it.  Summer days must cause me think of grad. school more than during the darker days of winter for some reason. I am not sure I will–or at this point in my life, even could–return to a possible future career as English professor.  But now, and I mean right now as I sit in my chair typing this on my laptop, I feel the need read a lot more often between now my next blog post, whenever that will be.  I hope it will be sooner than next month.