At some point recently, Drew and I began gargling tea like nobody’s business. We’ve got green tea, brown rice green tea, oolong tea, and female treasure tea. I still need to get Drew to drink some female treasure tea. Then, after that, I’ll get a box of the male treasure tea (or whatever the male version is called) and drink it all, and see if I feel nice and manly.
Job hunt is still working it’s dismal business. Or not working, as the case may be. I kinda wish my resume wasn’t all over the board. I also kinda wish I’d gotten my degree in something other then freaking illustration. Or at least double-majored, or something. I am still super-excited about trying to go back to school, but I suspect that it may be easier for me to grab a 2nd bachelor’s before attempting grad school. I want to do computer science, and, while I did take several math and CS courses during my first runaround in school, it’s not nearly enough to be able to get into grad school with. Meaning that even if I got accepted, I’d still need to take many undergrad courses. At grad school pricing. So, taking them as undergrad would be more financially astute. That, and apparently to get into the grad school I’m looking at (University of Colorado), one needs four letters of recommendation. My current job recommendation list of people wouldn’t translate so well into recommendations for grad school, and most of my undergrad teachers barely knew I was there where I was in their class, much less 8 years after the fact. Albeit, when I was actually in college, my dilemma was of the “my adviser is a landscape painter, this helps me not for computer-related grad school programs” sort of issue as well. And, I’d also need to retake the GRE. And study for the GRE. Err, and move to Colorado first, and get a permanent address there so that in a year’s time, when I actually start school, I’ll be considered in-state and quality for the much-lower tuition rate.
And then I’ve got these ingrown ideas about how I’m really just supposed to be doing art. I suspect is has to do with labeling. From when I was young I was the Artist to my parents (no Prince involved, mind you), and continued being the Artist for quite some time, despite having other things I was also good at and also enjoyed. So I tried the ‘art for a living’ thing (though the ‘art’ part is arguable), it’s called ‘painting bunches of identical urns over and over and over again until your brains fall out’. There are other ways to achieve ‘art for a living’ but they tend to involve painting many things that all seem similar, giving yourself a ‘look’, and then continuing to paint with that look so that people feel you’re consistent enough in what you create to trust you to create something for them. The whole ‘look’ think is tedious, to me. I find value in having the flexibility to create a range of art types.
In any case, developing a site/application to me is pretty much like drawing&painting a picture anyhow. You get this idea in your head of how it’s gonna look/work by the end, you map out what you’re gonna do (sketching a framework, or writing out a framework and setting up basic files with empty classes and functions sketching your future intentions with them). Or, if you’re like me, you neglect your framework and jump on in, leaving lots of correction for later (I’ll paint something so the shading ends up completely inconsistent with things I do later, and needs correcting/I’ll write out logic so a little part of my application becomes awesome, but needs complete rewriting later to become consistent with the rest of the larger application and to not have ridiculous redundancy). And in the end, I always have touchups. I’ll go back and darken/lighten things for better contrast, or I’ll go back in and add comments and change whole sets of variable names, just for better readability. In any case, I think doing art and writing code are exceptionally similar tasks.
And on a final note, I need to stop thinking that brownies are the ideal breakfast food, they’re not exactly the Breakfast of Champions here.
