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.

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).