Encouragement Can Lead To Inflation

When you talk to someone who shares in your excitement and does nothing but encourage you and offers links to your path, it does nothing but inflate your idealistic perception of reality. It's turned me into the figurative bride who walks into the most expensive part of the wedding dress shop.

The Bold Sockist

I have a new guilty pleasure: wearing patterned socks that do not match the rest of my outfit. They come in bright, ObNoXiOuS  colors that really don't maTch anything except other bright,  ObNoXiOuS  colors. This is a step in my new direction of 

Self-Manifestation.

Rise Up Cows!

This quote is from an essay by Paul Graham (a computer programmer), "The Other Road Ahead":

E. B. White was amused to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified fences don't have any current running through them. The cows apparently learn to stay away from them, and after that you don't need the current. "Rise up, cows!" he wrote, "Take your liberty while despots snore!"

If you're a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. One is that you don't know anything about business. The other is that you're afraid of competition. Neither of these fences have any current in them.

I'm not thinking of starting a startup, but I thought the quote was applicable to anything. And also amusing.

My Creativity Needs Ideas

Just watched the Weezy Waiter on Youtube. People are creative. Here I am thinking about going back to school when I should just be creative. Damn. Shoot. 

Baby "Masters"

Two weekends ago was graduation...all over the country. I was so excited for everyone who finished high school, college, and graduate school. The feelings of renewal and freedom were contagious!

However, I was surprised by the number of people who were younger than me (or even my age) and graduated with Master's degrees. These people have been in school almost their entire lives and now they have advanced degrees? With most of their experience embedded in the world of theory, what knowledge do they have of how the world actually works? They have all this knowledge in their field, but I'm willing to bet they have little concept of how to implement it.

My belief is that implementation requires knowledge of people and how to communicate with them. Being in the working world teaches you that you can't just perform tasks - you have to navigate through systems and negotiate with people to get something done. A teacher can't simply "teach" a student how to read and a chemical researcher can't just "perform experiments." What if someone doesn't want to learn or the head of your lab won't buy the equipment you need? You have to understand the point of view of the people you're working with and know how to align it with yours. School teaches you to perform a task and rewards you for getting done. It doesn't teach you the steps in the middle that happen in the real world.

This is where I have a problem with people getting advanced degrees before they've worked and it's why these "baby masters," as I call them, appear so ill-equipped in my mind. It makes sense to me to go to college, work, and then get a graduate degree. You come in with an understanding of the practical work and can therefore ask questions and learn how the knowledge you're receiving applies. I happened to be looking at some schools, in fact, and saw that their programs require students to have a few years of working experience before they can apply. Many business schools are like this, but I think it should be required for others as well.

I will grant that in some situations, you need to keep going to school in order to get into the practical experience. Medicine and information studies are two examples. Engineering and architecture are also fields where this may apply, but I've noticed that these programs incorporate co-op experiences (work-study) into the degrees...which is fantastic.

So on one hand, I'm excited for everyone graduating and dispersing their knowledge and energy into the world. On the other hand, it only reminds me how much improvement our education system needs.

We Hate The Stick

We have to use this shish-kabab skewer to measure the proportions of objects we draw. As the two other women at my table and I tried to replicate on our papers three different oddly-shaped, painted bottles, we realized that we didn't like the stick. You have to mark and count and estimate and involve math. We'd rather just draw what we see with our eye - even if the neck ends up twice as long as the body in our renderings. Paul told us to embrace the frustration, because it means our work will improve. In terms of my artistic aspirations, I guess my desire to break the stick into tiny piece shows progress?

Me and My Portfolio

I bought a professional portfolio to haul around my drawings in the elements and it came with a sense of confidence I didn't anticipate. All of sudden, I felt like a real artist...for no good reason. On one hand, I felt like I was becoming one those Amys I always wanted to be. Artists are some of the coolest people, in my opinion, and I admire their visual thinking - where I see words, they see pen strokes. On the other hand, I felt like a poser - albeit a badass artistic poser! My portfolio was empty - I had only just bought it - but I was ok to ride the facade for one night.

From The Drawing Room

I'm taking a drawing class this summer and I'm very excited about it. I took art in college and high school and while I was ok at it, it wasn't an area where I excelled. Once again, though, I have the need to express with my hands so I'm giving it another try.

My teacher, Paul, spent half of his education and career in the biological science field and is now a full-time working artist and teacher. If he emphasized anything in this first class, it was the misuse of the word, "talent." "People look at someone else's work that they think is better than theirs and say, 'Oh, they must have more talent than I have,'" he said. "That isn't true - they've just drawn more. If you look up "art" in your wishy-washy Webster's dictionary, you'll notice at the end of the definition it says 'see skill.' Art is a skill, not a talent, and anyone can learn it." He shared a story about how he took a semester of "fun" classes in college, and one of them was drawing. While he was taking drawing, his teacher told him that he should consider doing something else. "I don't know if the old goat is still alive - that was forty years ago - but I'll hold my work up to his any day. He was working under the assumption you had to have 'talent' to be a good artist. ...I learned nothing in his class." 

Here's one of Paul's paintings that I really like: http://paulmohr.net/painting_album/pages/paint_april.html

As the students went around the room to introduce themselves, I learned that many of them were painters who wanted to get the foundations of drawing that they missed along the way. One did quilting and other crafts. Another actually had a degree in art, but lost her connection to it when "life took her in other directions." We had an extroverted teacher in our midst, too, who wanted to know everyone's name and introduce us all to each other. It was funny. All the students were women and everyone except me was over forty. If there was one thing we had in common, though, it was that we all wanted to see. Some used the phrase "gain perspective." 

Paul then told us a story about one of his students whose mother was a professional painter. The student inherited one of her mom's paintings and hung it in her room. She loved looking at it every day - it was the first thing she saw when she woke up and the last thing she saw before she went to sleep. She said that after she took Paul's class, she finally understood how her mother made it and how she made it so beautiful. That insight is what we all wanted. 

I did do some drawing that first day, but it was awful. The class ends in July and I'll post my work then...after it has improved and doesn't embarrass me so much.

The Cursed Shape-shifters

I was envying a peer of mine recently. She is a do-er. She manages to fit travel, fluency in multiple languages, event-organizing, parties, work, dancing, and the ability to look stylish into her one, single life. In comparison to her, I have the same mph as a tortoise. I do everything one at a time... while she does everything at one time. I'm guessing my reflectiveness has something to do with it...because I tend to sit and think about things. And then I think about how I do that. And then I wonder why I think so much and plan ways to get out of my forever-thinking cycle. 

As I contemplated our differences on a walk one evening, I ended up organizing people into three categories: the diggers, the doers, and the shape-shifters. To best explain these concepts, I will compare them to squirrels. First, we have the diggers. These people find their single holes (read: niches) and are perfectly happy to stay in the same place for the rest of their lives. They dig further and further into their burrow and stockpile resources (money, knowledge, skills). Then we have the doers. These people have several holes. They spend their lives running around between all of them, collecting resources in several locations and having a blast doing it. They are usually at the front of every scene, making like a beam and displaying all their talents in everything they do. People go, "Wow! I want THAT extroverted, talented leader on MY team." Which is super for them. Really, way to go. 

But in the middle of this spectrum, we have the shape-shifters, one of which I consider myself. These souls find a spectacular O-shaped hole and build their pile of resources like the other squirrels. After a little while, though, they discover they no longer fit the O-shape and need an L-shape instead...so they go find or build a new hole. This takes time and resources. The not-so-great thing is that most of their resources are stuck inside the O-shaped hole. Consequently, they take what they can from it and begin the burrowing process again - squirrels very well can't live without a hole! After a short while, however, they cannot fit the L-shape anymore, and need a hole with a new shape. The poor squirrels end up continuously moving from hole to hole as they try to find a place where they can stay. They hope they can find fulfillment in SOME shape - ANY shape - so they can quit stopping and re-starting their lives and live in a nice comfortable hole. In the meantime, they usually have very few acorns stashed while the diggers and doers continue to build their nutty wealth. It's frustrating to be a shape-shifter, I tell you. Just. so. frustrating.