What it means to be an artist

Today I helped change the pump on my sister/brother-in-law's aerobic septic tank. (The sister-in-law was calling it Pump Day instead of Hump Day. Get it? LOL Don't boo me!) I volunteered to do this so I'd know how it's done. Why? Because when you're an artist, you don't make a lot of money, and add to that our debt from school, and you have a recipe for really not having any money. Sure, we're paying our debt off as fast as we can, but we might need to know how to do something like change a pump on an aerobic septic system one day. It wasn't too hard, just a little dirty and there was a slight learning curve and it was hot as blazes. If we do it again, I'm sure it would go faster. Before doing it, I was joking about starting a business changing pumps, after, I wished I had gone to school to be an oil and gas engineer, so I'd just have to fork over the money for someone else to do it.

My husband and I are also painting our neighbors house. I think I mentioned that before. It's taking way long than we imagined, but we'd never painted a house before. I think we should have it done in a few weeks. We need the money, and basically, freelance is just that. Unpredictable and unreliable. And lately I've had a good bit, but that could change at any moment. Which is why if you want to be an artist, you should NEVER go into debt to do it. Not for any reason, no matter what anyone tells you to the contrary. No. Matter. What.

In our over-sensitive whiny PC world, stereotypes are usually unacceptable, but whether you like it or not, stereotypes are often stereotypes for a reason. And in this case, there's a reason why starving artist is one of them.You want to be an artist? Plan on waiting tables, changing aerobic septic pumps and painting houses while you're at it. I've actually never waited tables. I'm too much of a klutz, I'm sure I'd spill stuff all over the diners.

Anyway, I haven't written in a while because finals were pretty busy, I went to visit family in North Carolina on May 20th and the Friday before that fell and hurt myself pretty badly. I had the worst bruise I'd ever seen on my lower stomach. I was grateful though that I didn't break anything or hit my head or knock my teeth out. The plane ride was amazingly horrible on the way, but the TSA was very nice. Maybe I'll try to write a little more often now that I'm feeling better. I hurt like hell for over a week. Did you know that you can dent dog food cans with your chest and not break a rib? LOL

Debt (of any kind) is Slavery

I'm originally from North Carolina, and so I had no idea what Juneteenth was. I'd never heard of it. It's pretty big in Texas. For those of you who don't know, Juneteenth, is derived from June 19th, and that was the day the Emancipation Proclamation was read to the slaves in Galveston, Texas, informing them that they were free.

It is one of those great coincidences that June 19th is the day that I decided that we were going to get out of debt. I didn't even realize the connection until some time later, but that is the day that I compiled for the first time a list of our debts. When we graduated from college I knew we had a lot of debt, and I had a rough idea of how much, but not an exact amount. I was actually afraid to add it all up. On June 19th last year, when I added up all of our debts, and saw the huge number on the screen in front of me, I cried. I knew it was bad, but seeing the number, and making it therefore real, hit me like a ton of bricks.

Now, we're not quite one year out and we have paid off our car and two of our small student loans. Small student loans that I once told my mother-in-law that I would just keep paying on because there was no way we could ever pay it all off. Now, I'm looking at having everything paid off in two years. There's more than one type of slavery. There is the obvious physical slavery, but there is another kind of slavery, one that is possibly worse than the physical kind, and that is slavery of the mind. If you believe that you will never get ahead, that the deck is stacked against you, that there's no use in trying, then you might as well consider yourself a slave. In that case, you are a slave to your mind.

 Yes, we may have limitations. Maybe the deck is stacked against us. Maybe we have to work within the framework of what we've been given, but to just give up? To accept that there are no possibilities? That's not an acceptable option. Not to me anyway. And maybe that's why I am where I am.

"If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything." -Marty McFly, Back to the Future (my favorite movie of all time)

I take back what I said...

I said that painting a house couldn't be too hard. Famous last words. I don't think I had any idea what I was getting myself into. We started painting the porch yesterday, and I thought we could finish the whole thing before the end of the day, well, we got close but not finished. And that was only one porch. There are three. Our neighbor's son is going to paint the very high part of the eaves for me, and I didn't argue with them because, while I'm not afraid of heights, being sixteen feet up on a ladder isn't my idea of fun. Anyway, I think they offered to do that because we spent a week caulking everything really well, and so what they're paying us didn't consider all the caulking that needed to be done. At any rate, I'm about whooped after yesterday, I went to bed at 9pm and slept until 8am. On the bright side, I'd rather paint a house than work for a certain big-box-retailer-that-will-not-be-named. I'm not really sure that painting pays all that much better when you consider the hours put in, but I get to be outside.

Mamas, don't let your children grow up to be artists. Or at least not artists with massive amounts of student loans. It's not a good idea. It's easy to be an artist when you don't have Sallie Mae sleeping in your guest bedroom. We're working on kicking her out of our lives, it's just taking so long.

A flashback...
"This night will pass just like all the others." That's what I used to tell myself when I worked at a grocery store in high school. I really needed to grow a backbone then, and ought to have told those jerk faces to go to hell. They paid me minimum wage for two years, and I'm not entirely sure why I put up with them. The first two days on the job should have been a huge red flag. My drawer was short those first two days, and so I told my mother about it, wondering what I had done wrong with counting change. She asked me if I'd counted my drawer beforehand, and I'd said no. She said, 'you should always count your drawer before you start your shift.' The third day I demanded that it be counted before starting. It came up short by a lot.

Also, it's not like I liked working for them. I could have gotten a different job somewhere else that probably paid more, but I didn't. And looking back, I have no idea why. All that time wasted with assholes. The moral of this story? If you're not happy with things, then change them. Life is too short to be unhappy.