The Illusion of Security

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).

Busy, Distracted & Disgusted

So, I was supposed to try to write something here everyday but I didn't. This last week was busy, busy, busy. The in-laws made it back just fine. I'm glad they're back, their dogs were about to drive me crazy. They'd like to inform the world that buying a SIM card from Wind in Italy is a rip-off. In fact, I think that most of Italy is a black market of underworld shenanigans. Is that accurate? I don't know, I'm tired and not thinking all that clearly, but I do love Italy anyway. And why am I (mentally & emotionally) tired? Some of my students this semester are thick headed, you can explain something to them that the average person ought to understand at first glance and they look at me like I have three heads. You can demonstrate something and in three seconds they don't remember where I told them to click. Are they all on Statins or something? I bring that up because on the radio this evening on the way home, the news came on, and they were announcing how great it was that more Americans could be on Statins now, since they've lowered the threshold for acceptable cholesterol. Never mind that cholesterol is important for brain function and cell wall stability, or that statins are associated with muscle degeneration and transient global amnesia, and also with Alzheimers, but never mind that! We're going to save everyone from the dreaded heart disease, even if it means turning everyone in the country into stupid, sickly people. Ever seen the movie Idiocracy? Yeah, um, when I first saw that, I thought it was absurd, but now, now I'm not so sure that that isn't where we're going.

I'm tired, teaching wears me the hell out, especially when I have to repeat myself like a broken record because people are incapable of taking notes. Don't get me wrong, I like teaching. That is, I like teaching when I have students who look like they have half their act together and pretend to care. I saw the other day something about free college tuition for community colleges, where anyone and everyone can go for free. Yeah, then community college education can be as good as our free public high school education. I'll let you take that one to it's logical conclusion. Eventually, I figure that a college degree will be about as worthwhile as a high school one, because gosh darn-it don'tchya know everyone gets a trophy and everyone can do anything they want. Bull hockey sticks. Some people shouldn't be in college, it's not for them, and they're pushed into it anyway, and then they wind up tens or even a hundred thousand dollars in debt and not even a degree to show for it because they couldn't make it through the program. And if they do make it through the program, they find that they're not cut out for whatever it was they studied, because the real world doesn't give a flying fuck what piece of paper you have, if you can't take a shower, show up for work on time, and meet deadlines. And the little darlings, starting in grade school, are lied to, and told that if only they have a piece of paper everything will work out for them. Hard work, work ethic, and responsibility are not the words du jour.

I'm going to take a shower and go to bed before I tell you how I really feel.