Yesterday I went down to my hunting spot at the creek and swapped the card in the game camera. I like the camera I bought, it's a Wildgame Innovations Lightsout camera. I got it in January and have had it out for three months on the same set of AA batteries. The last trail cam I had was crap and ate through D batteries like they were going out of style or something. Anyway, the pictures are very nice, and I had a lot of deer coming through and a couple of racoons, a squirrel, and a pig too. I need to go down there and clear some more branches out of my way before it gets too hot to do anything outside.
Today I had a little bit of a meltdown. I've had a good amount of work lately, I'm an artist, but it's all contract work, and I guess I'd really like to have something a little more permanent. But maybe that's just an illusion, permanence I mean. Sure, someone can say a job is permanent, but as anyone who has read anything of history knows, nothing is really and truly permanent.
I think that the goal of paying off our loans over the last few months made a little distraction for me. I'm fairly goal-oriented, and so while I was working toward paying off the car and the two small student loans we had, my mind was preoccupied on that. However, now that that's all done, and we have two very big loans left that are going to take at least a couple years to pay off, and since we got hit with a huge tax bill this April, it feels like progress has stopped and now my brain has reverted to trying to figure out something else to do with my life. I don't know what that something else is. All I know is that, as much as I love it, a career in animation is unstable and unpredictable, and that the old fall back of teaching for a living is gone forever as a career. Colleges and universities have no intention of hiring permanent faculty of any sort, and are using primarily adjuncts to teach their classes. It saves them an enormous amount of money not to have to pay out things like health insurance, holiday pay, sick pay, pensions, etc. ad infinitum. Truly, with the easy availability of student loan monies to flow into their coffers, they are really focused on quantity rather than quality. The more students they can get in the door, the more money they make. This isn't an indictment of any particular school, but rather of the system itself. This system is in danger of degrading the quality and recognition of our higher eduction degrees. As more and more public money becomes tied up in higher eduction (even in private colleges and universities) the more likely it is that we will see "standards" implemented as we have in our public high schools. And we all know how well that's worked out for us as a society /snark.
I keep thinking that maybe I'd like to start my own studio, but I don't even know where to begin on that one. I'm not sure that I could run a business. My dad has great business sense, but I've never had a chance to try running anything, so who knows how that would go? I'm also over spending money on more schooling. I've already spent more than what many people pay for a house on my BFA. You may ask me if it were worth it, and I'm gonna have to ask that I get back to you on that one, because I think it's too soon to tell even though I've been out of school for eight years. Really, what people should be after when getting a degree of any sort, is whether said degree gives them an ROI or not. Otherwise, why bother? I mean, unless of course you have a trust fund or something, then by all means, waste all the money you want. For the rest of us poor plebes, the results of spending our hard earned money ought to be measured by whether it was financially worth it or not. And let's face it, some degrees aren't worth the paper they are written on.
Security is an illusion. It is marketed and sold to us in multiple forms, from the benign idea that getting a degree gives you some kind of job security (which is a lie), to the more devious sort, that if you give up your freedom, the government will ensure your safety (an even bigger lie).
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