Move It, Shake It

Sorry, I am better now. I do hate being at home all the time and am greatly going to miss my studio up in SB. It serves as my place to go and be a photographer. It is my space. And now I can't afford in anymore and feel irresponsible if I leave the house because I am spending money on gas, money on food, money on existing outside these four walls. But that is just it. Inside these four walls I don't always exist. Outside them, I do. I just need an actual paycheck to make that feel more like I earned it and less like I am leeching. I don't want to leech. I don't want to be a kept woman or a home body. We have no kids, so it is not justified for me to be home all day. I realize that I can use this time to be creative, can use this time to focus on making my work for my final show, but it is hard to do that. It is hard to decide to be productive in the same way that other creative people are productive.

When I was writing my second novel I would come home from work and sit down at my computer for sometimes three or four hours a night. In some ways writing takes you away to a new place, allows your imagination to create whatever you want. It can be a very liberating, very exciting journey. Photography has a very different feel for me. I can create images, sure, I can set up the landscape of my choice, the props, the costuming, but that preproduction doesn't flow as quickly and easily as you can write a story. (I am not saying that there is not preproduction to good writing, mind you, there is a ton of it, but when I write, I write what comes to me and worry about the editing later.) With photography, one of the things that I always mention when I am teaching or lecturing is that you should have a ton of preproduction. You should make the image exactly the way you want it to turn out and do a tiny bit of post to make those elements perfect that didn't come together naturally during the shoot. There is less room for imagination in a lot of ways. Less room to play when the actual creative act is at hand.

At any rate, at this point in time I am using these four walls as my studio, shooting a project that doesn't stimulate my creativity nearly at all. My intellectual side, maybe, but not my creative. Which is why I have to get out of the house. Go anywhere, do anything. That is the beauty of a laptop, the freedom of a G10. I don't need the set up, don't need the studio just to live, just to find that place where I exist beyond this insanity and find some peace in the moment. And the air always feels good through an open car window in spring, driving down the highway.

Home Body

I have become something I never wanted to be. I cannot find a job that I can actually take and want to take. I am not being picky here, but I think it is important that I find a job either in photography or teaching and most of those jobs I either don't ft the qualifications or they are too far away for me to feasibly apply. Different state far away. Different country. And I am feeling more and more of this pressure to make good on the promise to myself and others that this degree would lead to something. That I would be the better for the time spent, the frustrations endured, the pain, the money, the choices. And here I am, not producing. Not making any money with my hundred thousand dollar education.

I am frustrated equally by the money and tribulations as I am by the failed principles at work. I promised myself that I wouldn't squander this education. When I got my first degree I hit a bump in the road and got scared off the road (Physics) and then got a little bored and stopped working (Senioritis) and ended up with a 3.75 when the honors cutoff was 3.76. I know that may not seem like squandering to you, but had I achieved the easy A in linguistics that I very easily could have gotten, I would have that golden rope. I would have actually been in the top ten percent that I deserved, prior to my poor behavior. I would have been demonstrably worthy.

Yes, these things matter to me. This is why I have a 3.99 GPA now. Over the last three years I have gotten two A-'s. One the session that my grandfather died and I missed a week of classes (keep in mind these classes are seven weeks long) and one in Art History that I still don't know how I could have done better. I don't regret either of them because I never stopped trying. I did my best work for everyone, for every assignment. And if I didn't pass an assignment I reshot it, every time. There isn't a single assignment in the undergraduate program that I didn't pass. There isn't anything that I skimped on, any time when I fell down in my duties as a student.

But now look at me. None of that seems to have mattered. The dedication that I applied, and have always associated with success because that is always what I was told, hasn't led to anything. Out of my classmates, I am not one of the ones that is employed. I haven't been published. I haven't won any contests, been in any juried shows. Even in art, it has always been a balance of talent and hard work that has been the recipe for success. That was always what I was told. But I am getting more and more tired and more and more poor. At this rate, my husband and I can live for another 3.5 months before we need a second income to pay the bills. 3.5 months. Maybe I screwed myself over with my BA too much to recover now. Maybe I should have been a physicist. Maybe I should have stuck that out and the fact that I didn't means that my potential was squandered ten years ago when I left the program when I was third in the class. Now, I am merely another graduate student with excessive student loans and absolutely nothing to show for any of it.