Things I'd Like to Do...

I don't think I'm going to use today's prompt from the Daily Post. Firstly, I've realized that the whole website is built around Wordpress users. This makes me feel left out when I participate in the prompt but can't get a link back, and also furthers my growing insecurity that having chose blogger over Wordpress a billion years ago, I have missed out on some degree of streed cred...or, web cred, I guess? There's just something about a Wordpress site that makes you think, "Man. This blogger is the real thing."

Secondly, the prompt is called "Out of Breath," and it's all about describing "the busiest, most hectic day you've had in the past decade." Honestly, that just feels like a really stressful thought experiment. Maybe all this mediation is getting to me, but I don't feel compelled to take the time to attempt to remember which day out of the past ten years ranks as the most stressful, and then relive that stress.

Suffice it to say, I'm sure it fell somewhere in the timeframe when I was in my final quarter of my Associate's Degree, juggling a full course load which included a portfolio-building seminar that culminated, very time-consumingly, in an art show put on by my class (and a twelve-page paper), a 24-30ish hours-a-week part-time job, an internship that was supposed to be paid (and therefore replace the job) but turned out to pretty much not be, about 7 hours a week worth of commuting, and all of my responsibilities at home.

You can tell it was hectic because of how long that sentence was.

Still, I guess it really was more hectic than stressful...or at least, no matter what it was, I look back on that time fondly. I look back on all my time at SMCC fondly, as probably the best two years of my life. There were pitfalls, sure, but I was pursuing something I was passionate about, bettering my life, meeting new people, and really just feeling this sense of empowerment: I was learning how to do things that I previously would have hit a total block in attempting to do. Something like, "I better not attempt this, I have no idea how."

In a lot of the art classes at SMCC, you just did it, it wasn't any more complicated than that. I wish a little more of that had stayed with me.

That quarter in particular, though, I have a special fondness for, probably because I simply didn't have time to be overly broody. My time was divided up between all these different things, with all these different people in all these different place. I'm busy now, too, but I'm pretty much either at-work busy or at-home busy. God, I'd really love to take an art class right now. Even if it wouldn't pay off for a long time: just, start saving up nickels that might eventually buy me an airline ticket to somewhere great.

I genuinely don't think that's in the cards for me for quite a while, though. I am enrolled in school right now, though not in any classes this semester, but it's an online degree. Communications, or something broad and useful like that.

I like communications. Marketing. I like that it got me the job I have now. But I wonder where I would be if I had decided to go to the Maine College of Art or a USM art program right after SMCC. I wonder if I'd still be pursuing the dream I went to SMCC to get closer to: writing and illustrating my own children's books.

In my mind, I'm still going to do that. But I'm eminently aware of the fact that every day older I get without actively working towards it puts me one day closer to a future where I've accidentally just driven right past my chance. I tell myself, it's cool, it's something I will get to. But then I ask myself: Will I really?


I've had a thought poking around for a while that an interesting way to start breaking into illustrating wouuld be to take some of the best posts from the history of this blog and do an illustrated version. Again, something I sort of vaguely intend to do. But...you know, maybe I should just...do it.

It feels intimidating, like something I maybe don't know how to do anymore. It's been a long time since I spent any time on my art, and it's not like I was super good at it in the first place; I never claimed to be. But I do remember my instructor, Jeff, saying that I had a really refined since of narrative in my art. He thought I should go to Vermont to get my Bachelor's in this college that had just launched a Comic Arts major. Talk about Street Cred.

Jeff is the type of person who makes you want to be cool. He's this incredibly gregarious, multi-talented, funny and smart person who you just want to impress, even years after the last time you talked to them. One of the reasons I'm really interested in recording a Scrumgirl EP is so that I can, apropo of nothing, send it to him. I'd love to go down to First Friday in Portland some time in the future and have him say, "Hey! I listened to that CD you sent me! It was great."

Anyway...I'm getting meandering. There's this new RSS feed reader that seems to be distributing my posts to a small group of people. Maybe you're one of them, or maybe they're all bots. But if you are one of them, and you'd be interested in seeing some illustrated posts, shoot me an E-mail, or leave a comment maybe. Let's see where this goes.

Day 11. On with it.