Renewed

In the past 6 weeks I have worked on around 60 thumbnails, 15 rough comps and 6 final presentations, back to back without a break,  along with some tweaking of each design thanks to a very particular but inspirational professor! I had to contend with an Adobe Creative Suite that is not that happy on a Mac and nearly obsolete (must buy the updates soon, can’t afford to yet!) and the usual things life throws at you when you just don’t have the time to deal with things.  Its no wonder I feel dizzy. But you know what?  I love it. I prefer this kind of motion to sitting around twiddling my thumbs.

My next class is going to be even more exciting. Another studio class, this time its page layout. I feel like I’ve done this before but this class looks like it will focus on professional work flow rather than teaching a software program. That starts today. And here I am updating my blog instead of worrying about that. I need a half an hour to breath before I take it on.

While its been a whirlwind, I feel great. My instructors wife is an art director and he had shown her my work. He came back with “she is impressed”. Cool. Its hard to work on a piece so intensely that you can’t tell if it works or not. Another set of objective eyes mean a lot.

The result though is that I’ve been neglecting my garden, my mushrooms and the house. I don’t care about the house so much but the other stuff I do. Because I haven’t been doing much as far as homesteading, I haven’t written much about it. On the other hand, being in this extreme creative mode, I did have thoughts in the back of my mind regarding the world at large and my own little corner of it.

And the final say? Its over rated. Yes, that is correct. Over rated. Not life but homesteading. Its hard work. Its  a challenge here and there, but once a task is mastered, it becomes mundane. What I mean is, its come to the point for me that I have to see it as yet another  Stepford Wife thing. I hope to never become one of those! But even as I expanded my repertoire as a homesteader, the rest of my life began to narrow. I live outside a box but what has started to happen is that I created my own box in which I dwell. I do go to extremes. Its just  who I am. Unfortunately, I had come to feel trapped again.

I needed this class to help me break out. Did I break out though? Not yet.

So why continue to do it? I suppose because I must. I never felt like an actual homesteader. My roots were far more into the survival aspect of things without the guns and ammo and pseudo patriotism. Because I have been so busy, I feared that I had lost the connection to the survival instinct. But realizing the error of my ways is a survival instinct in itself.
And what is that error?

I have been so down on the future that I wasn’t taking all scenarios into consideration. I have all the doom and gloom stuff covered. What  I don’t have is “what if the world rights itself against all odds” covered. There maybe a spot for people like me in that world and as a family, we have to be able to survive there as well. As an artist and as a designer. These two subjects are highly under rated in society at large. So my focus shifts again. Towards art and design. The person I was before I started getting really worried. That person is me. I let that person smother and it was painful. But I never let it die completely. Even more painful.

Where this will lead is anybodies guess. I’m just waking up now. I will still “homestead to survive”. But there is more to life than surviving. I’ve always been focused on ultimately thriving.

I came across a great quote for my most recent project (designing an insane clock believe it or not).

“They say time changes things, but you have to change them yourself”. Andy Warhol no less.