I feel a bit, these days, like I'm out of the loop. It's not that I don't know what I want to do one day, but that I don't feel like I know what I need to do in order to get there.

As Bridget and Astrid and I have endlessly discussed every time we're in the same room, Terabil has this insidious ability to suck all the motivation to improve and move out out of you and lull you into complacency with its cheap rent and suburban sprawl until you're, well, living at home and working a shitty dead-end job a year later and wondering where the hell all your fire and passion went. It's truly disturbing. In fact, the only time I've produced any artwork this past year is when I have left the city and gone on vacation visiting someone else. This has led to some truly epic frustration on my part, as well as a half-sincere belief that this city has some kind of Frank Peretti-style demonic curse on it, except in this version the only people who are demonically possessed are the people who AREN'T college students.

I'm somewhat torn between accepting this job as the best I can do for a while and at least using that guaranteed income to get my own apartment, and continuing to try to find other jobs in other places and accepting living at home as the compromise I have to make for the chance to be able to take those other jobs if they come. Not that the other job offers are exactly flowing in, but the possibility makes me not want to settle down lest Murphy's law compel some employer to offer me a decent wage somewhere else right after I take out a lease. At one point recently I had a job opportunity elsewhere, which would have been just as unrelated to art as my current one and entailed a tripled cost of living in the new city for substantially similar wages, and I was ALL READY to jump on it until I looked at my work schedule and realized it would be impossible to make it to that city for an interview.

(Which is another work-related rant-- I am classed as a subcontractor, which makes taxes a right royal bitch to do, but I'm pretty much treated like an employee. Pretty much the only reason I put up with it is because I'm at least paid decently for my trouble, and I'm essentially being paid to be an insomniac with some nifty medical skills.)

Mostly what irritates me about the situation is that a full year and a month after graduating from college, and after swearing to myself that it would not be so, I am still, indeed, living at home and working at a job which has absolutely nothing to do with art. Not even the most tangential connection. And I have not produced a significant piece of artwork in nearly as long. In the last three months, I have produced two sketches each of a stuffed fish and a mounted deer head I found in the supply closet at work, as well as two small watercolors of eggplant from our garden. This is roughly equivalent to half a week's homework in college. A light week.

Now I'm looking up different graduate schools, and researching various financial aid things, and considering whether I would be able to work part-time and go to school or whether various programs would accept my somewhat baroque undergrad degree as an acceptable prerequisite or if I would have to take a lot of intro courses to get up to speed, and then I thought about portfolios... and realized that I basically have a big, blank year of doing dead-end work in the ideological armpit-pimple of the nation* and have absolutely nothing to show for it.

So pretty much now I'm looking for whatever entry-level design employment in pretty much any other city on the East Coast outside of NYC I can get and hoping that if I can just get out of Terabil, my right brain will wake up again and start making up for lost time.

*Anyone who's got real-name privilege, remind me to tell you sometime about the white-supremacy organization that's quartered here. And our newspaper, which likes to publish Michelle Malkin and Cal Thomas op-eds and letters-to-the-editor screeds about God-guns-and-gays. Oh, it's delightful.

Labels: art, home, work

So I have a job. More or less. I start training as a polysomnographic technician on Friday at the sleep lab that my dad's practice* works with. Basically, the job is to hook people up with various electrodes and CPAP masks and whatnot, send them off to sleep, watch the monitors and entertain yourself for the next seven hours, and then wake them up and unhook them and send 'em home.

On the one hand I'm obviously glad I can now earn some money instead of sitting at home assembling jewelry and reading politics blogs through the wee hours of the night. And it's nice to have my sleep disorder work in my favor for once. Though to be fair, it also gave me the ability to pull all-nighters without any stimulants, which was kind of impressive, but is kind of useless outside college.

On the other hand, it's sort of disappointing to know that your main qualification for your job is not your painstakingly acquired art skills, nor your scintillating wit, nor well-honed mental abilities, but a circadian quirk in your mental circuitry.

I thought at first I was compromising by looking for jobs in graphic design, which is not terribly close to my actual major but can be done with the skills acquired. And I thought that the last thing I would do is accept any job in my hometown, which I've been dying to leave for, oh, the past decade or so. And I really thought that getting my degree would be my ticket out of town. Nope. It's seven months after graduation and after two or three false starts**, I'm working at a totally unrelated job whose main appeal is the ability to wake up at three in the afternoon and watch late-night X-files marathons on TNT while working, and still in Terabil.

My main hope now is that after working six months or so I can transfer to a sleep lab in Broceliande or Avalon (which has one, fortunately, so theoretically I could work there during grad school). And while I'm working, I can use the downtime to do some artwork. I'm planning tentatively on using the time to get a webcomic version of my senior project started.

I feel kind of stupid for feeling disappointed about getting a job, and at the same time I feel kind of like I gave up too soon, and maybe I could have found something better if I'd held out and moved to Broceliande like I'd planned. Then I feel dumb for being picky and I should just be happy I have a job at all, even if it's not what I expected and not really what I want.

I also can't help but think, because The Little Voices like to creep up at times like these, that the reason I'm not getting any art- or design-related jobs is because secretly, I suck. And while I've received enough compliments and whatnot on my abilities in the past to know that I clearly have something going for me in that regard, and I've read enough to know that it's less a matter of ability and more a matter of connections and experience, it's not a hard leap from "not quite good enough" or "not good in the specific currently-marketable way" to "not good at all."

I had the same problem with portfolio reviews in my senior year, when I'd show my senior project to the visiting comics editors, who were all men with a strong preference for black-and-white serial work, and they had no idea what to do with a fully-painted female-centric graphic novel that didn't already look like someone else's style. (The closest comparison I've gotten is Terry Moore, which is awesome because I love him to death, but the older I get the less my stuff looks like his.) It clearly wasn't that I sucked, just that I was working outside the box, but it was hard to think so right when I had ZOMG FAMOUS EDITORS telling me "well, we don't really... do... this kind of stuff."

It doesn't help that I have produced absolutely no art since getting back from Broceliande, and very little in general since graduating. Terabil sucks my brain dry, I swear. In Broceliande I was seriously making up for lost time, and actually drawing for fun again, but the minute I get back home I can barely force myself to work on my commission piece for my aunt. It's extremely obnoxious.

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* My dad, not to give away identifying details or anything, specializes in a branch of medicine that usually has nothing to do with sleep, but all it took was one crossover ailment and now he's board-certified in sleep medicine as well as three other specialties. He also has a business degree and taught himself computer programming, apparently for fun. My dad, not to put too fine a point on it, is a nerd. At least I know where I get it.

** False start one-- got an interview, found a disgruntled employee report online for the company. False start two-- got an interview, did really well, previous occupant of position came back. False start three-- I don't even know why I didn't get it. My mom claims it was because I wore jeans to turn in the application.

Labels: home, work