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Letters from an Artist

April, 2005

4-30-05
There is a phone in my office that blinks all the time. The little red eye blinks out it's warning to me whenever I go over the filing cabinet. "Blink, Blink, you have a message," it says, to the quiet room. It sits forlornly on the desk of the teacher who used to share the office with me. I tried once to retrieve the messages, but it doesn't like my passwords. I even answered it once or twice, only to be confronted with some person from outside the college asking questions I couldn't answer.
   Now, I just let it blink, and it's become a metaphor for my life, the many unanswered questions...a reminder of all the dreams on which I used to pin my hopes. The talents that shown so brightly earlier in my life, trodden on now by the necessity to earn a living, to help support my family, pay the bills...all the usual culprits.
    On my way home from work last night in a heavy rain shower I became enmeshed in the usual 6 PM traffic jam, rolling along at a slow walking speed and generally cursing my luck when I noticed an open window on the pickup in the lane to my left. Unlike my barebones pickup truck which doesn't have either an extended cab or a window in the back, this pickup had the sliding back window open. Just inside the window I could see what looked like a fur hat, moving slightly in the wind.
   Something about it didn't seem right, and as I inched forward I kept glancing over at it, curious to see something animal in this long train of dripping, rolling metal boxes. Inevitably his lane slowed down and I got a closer look. What I had thought was a fur hat turned out to be a big black and brown dog sitting in the back seat with it's mouth pointed straight up at the sky. The splotch of brown I'd seen was the lighter color of it's neck as it strained to lick the water dripping down from the rain gutter above the sliding window.
       We rolled along in lockstep for a few hundred yards, the dog's tongue never missing a beat as the heavy rain pounded down, ran off the rain gutter of the sliding glass window and into the dogs mouth. When I pulled ahead, I glanced over at the driver: young guy, mid twenties with a baseball cap. He looked over at me, saw my smile, knew I'd been watching the dog and returned it with a wink and a shrug, as if to say, "dogs, what can you do?"
     There was a lot of humanity in that gesture. It's almost weird to interact with other people on the road anymore. Everyone seems lost in their own private worlds. There are times when it seems like half of the people on the road are talking on cellphones. I'm not sure what the big attraction of cellphones is. I do remember being attracted to walkie talkies when I was in my twenties. I bought a decent pair at Radio Shack and took them climbing so we could communicate when the wind got too high to holler.
  I don't know if it's simply the result of a very good advertising campaign on the part of the wireless industry or the loneliness of our modern civilization, but cellphones have gone from not existing at all to being as necessary as air. They ring in my classroom several times each morning. I tell the students to turn them off unless they are volunteer firemen. During lunch, or even on the ten minute breaks, there are herds of phone junkies out in the hall communing over the radio waves.
     Back before cellphones (does anyone still remember?) it seemed like people would communicate more openly with those around them. If you were walking along and saw a friendly face, you could say hello, maybe exchange pleasantries about the weather. But now, everyone is talking on a cellphone to someone who is truly important. The people they spend their days with at school or at work are only poor stand in's for the IMPORTANT person on the other end of the cellphone connection.

As one of my fellow teachers observed: "A lot of talking going on, but nothing being said."

    In other big news I got my tax refund and went on a spending spree, picking up a new climbing rope and an electric can opener for Sue, who has to wait until the end of May to get her rotator cuff surgery. My drawing students did perspective drawing this week and it was great fun seeing them out in the hallway mastering the complexities of rendering three dimensional space on the 2d surface.
   We finally got around to hanging the students pictures on the walls. JM bought about 8 black presentation boards and we covered them with printouts of the students work. Most of the best ones were Photoshop montages created by JM's Digital Photography students.
        They get very good at studio photography and put together some amazing images featuring, among other things: a student surfing on a computer mouse, a student balancing a twenty foot tall video camera on her finger, a student painting a self portrait of herself painting a self portrait. It's all trickery of course, but it's done to professional standards, and the black presentation boards stretch along the hallway for 60 feet, suspended from invisible 25 pound test fishing wire hooked to clips on the ceiling...no pounding nails in the governments walls!

4-21-05
Should be studying php, but instead I'm writing in this journal. It's 8:30 PM on a Thursday night of a typical week of teaching. I'm getting comfortable with my course load after 4 weeks of class and I've gotten to know the latest group of new students. It's always hard at first to stand in front of a new group of strangers and play the part of the "professor". I'm really just an ordinary guy, not a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but to be the guy standing in front of a classroom, well, the students expect me to be something special...and I must admit to moments of doubt.
Still, they tell me I'm excellent at my job, and maybe they are right, but in my heart of hearts I'm really just a frustrated artist trying to bring home a steady paycheck. This whole computer thing is just something I fell into because I got tired of working swing as a pressman. I didn't plan to be a pressman either, but did it for 24 years. Sometimes I feel like a piece of flotsam floating down a river, letting life lead me where it will. I don't recommend it as a lifestyle.
Some of the more noteworthy things going on right now are:

Clint's car got broken into at college and they took his radar detector, his portable cd player, and his entire cd collection, about 10 pounds worth. Fortunately the thief's got scared off before they could rip off his bicycles, both of which were sitting unlocked in his canopy. He has a long history of being careless of security, so this is a great life lesson for him. Also fortunate is the fact that most of his cd's were burned copies of cd's he'd checked out from the library or borrowed from friends.

Sue's bad rotator cuff problem has become worse and she is scheduled to have surgery on it in a month, which means no climbing this summer for her.

I found out that another one of my old climbing partners has died. Larry Kemp and his wife Sue Kemp were climbing buddies of ours back in the early eighties, and we had many adventures together, including trips to Yosemite and ice climbing in the winter. Sue Kemp and I shared a love for playing guitars, as well as leading hard cracks at Index. Her husband, Larry was a legend around Index and Leavenworth. The guy could lead some very hard rock climbs, and while he tended to be a bit uppity, I still respected his climbing ability, and his wife was a great friend to my wife and I, with a very warm heart.
Larry died in a bicycling accident in Spain about a year ago. I had no idea until I saw a newspaper article in the Seattle Times online:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/getaways/219792_townwall14.html

where his photography was featured. I made some enquiries of the reporter, thinking I could get back in touch with Larry, only to find he had died:

http://www.jetcityvelo.com/race.htm

I ride a lot for exercise, so that hit a bit close to home. Now that I've spend 30 minutes writing, the thought of studying php for a couple more hours is unbearable. I'll save it for the weekend. At lunch yesterday there were pretty puffy clouds high above in the blue sky. I laid on my back on the bench at lunch and stared up at them in wonder. Clouds appear at first glance to be quite stable, granted, they are always moving across the sky, but on a casual examination they hold their shape.
   However, if you really stare at a cloud, you will notice that the cloud is constantly moving and reforming itself in infinitely complex swirls of white water vapor, moving in (not so) slow motion.
      Stare for a while at a hole in a white cloud, and you will see that it is swirling in motion, usually in a circular pattern. Wisps of the white water vapor circle around the hole in front of other wisps, commingling in 3 dimensions in an amazingly complex dance of opacity, all the while moving across the sky above at speeds that are unimaginable to the earth bound viewer.
    As I stared up at the marvelous show, I was reminded once again of how we live in an atmosphere that is very much like the sea. Those clouds up there are floating in the same soup that I am breathing, and a plane is simply a high speed submarine, motoring though the soup.

Things I'm thankful for today:

I'm down to 160 pounds again
I'm getting a tax refund of $460
A client owes me $170
Our 3 reliable cars
My drawing class, love teaching that class!
My healthy family and our active lifestyles
Our house...one of the few sound financial decisions I've made
The friendly people I work with
A beautiful, sunny day today

4-16-05
While sitting at my computer after work yesterday, one of my fellow teachers walked by my open office door and looked in.

"Hey Mark, How's it going?"

"Oh...another day in Paradise," I said, with some irony.

He wasn't sure of my meaning and paused to lean on my door frame, coffee cup in hand.

"That's rather optimistic isn't it? I mean, considering that we are here and all," he said.

I pondered the many responses I could make to this question before replying carefully:

"It's true that there are many places I would rather be than sitting here in this empty building at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon grading homework. Still, at least I wasn't born to a starving family living in a mud hut in Africa...I mean, this a far better existence than that."

"Yeah," he replied, "You could have been born in Iraq and be ducking bullets right now."

"And yet, here we are, complaining about it," I said. "While there are many things about my life I would like to change, if you look at it from a certain perspective, this could be considered just another day in Paradise"

Winter has arrived with a vengeance. I'm working 5 days a week this quarter and have very little time available for any activities other than simply keeping my head above water. I'm still trying to study php, but only managed to squeeze in about 5 hours this week. I have a new class again and have been trying to adapt the previous instructors books and lesson plans to my teaching style...without tying up all my free time. I also sort of have a freelance client, but it's a big organization with many bosses, and I'm not sure if it will work out.
As usual, my teaching job interferes with any plans I may have to freelance or pursue other objectives. Still, at least I have a job, and it sort of pays the bills, at least the day to day bills. As far as building up a nest egg to pay for car repairs, or retirement...I guess that's for rich people. When I read the magazine articles about how you should be setting aside money for retirement, I just laugh. I'm lucky if I have enough to put fifty dollars toward my VISA bill, much less worry about retirement.
It's true that my current employer does have a matching pension fund, and I contribute, but in reality it's too little, too late. Still, at least we have food to eat, and we're all reasonably healthy. I think I'm suffering from a little cabin fever. This rain is getting real old. It appears to be lightening up, perhaps I can spend an hour tinkering with our 1991 Corolla. It's becoming hard to start. It runs great once it starts, but has a disturbing body shake when it's cold.

4-9-05
Sitting at the kitchen table this morning my mind was buzzing with a cyclone of ideas and tasks that I needed to do. The computer sat waiting for me to finish my taxes, while Sue paced around behind me waiting for me to be ready to go to town for a shopping trip. Meanwhile, I was writing code on a sheet of paper, trying to figure out how to animate the lights of a virtual elevator.
     One of my Flash students had created a very nice elevator with doors that opened and closed on command. He'd clearly been hooked by the program and had spent about 10 hours building his virtual elevator. I'd suggested he build in the lights above the door showing which floor the elevator was on, and had foolishly told him that it would be relatively easy to make the lights "go to the floor" of which ever floor button his user had pushed.
    After going back to my desk, I got to thinking about it and realized I was wrong. If his user was on floor one, and pressed the button for floor 5, yes, you could easily get the lights to blink on and off in sequence as the elevator rose up to floor 5. But if they were on floor 3, and pressed the button for floor 1, the animation would have to run backwards.
     Thinking about the programming involved was kind of fun, and I filled half a page with script before realizing I was wasting time. He doesn't need to have his elevator be that fancy in his second week of Flash, and I was allowing myself to fall into the trap of working for free on the weekend.
      Sue and I drove to town where we rollerbladed the bike path and I got a haircut. I hate the feeling of hair in my ears, and it's simply divine to have it short and manageable. The bike path was in prime condition. The recent rain has washed it clean and the light cool breeze kept the sun from being too hot. Traffic whizzed by on the freeway above, but it was far enough away that we were able to enjoy the exercise.
     When we got home we both collapsed on the couch and fell asleep. When I woke up a couple hours later my mind started to whir again with the long list of tasks that needed doing immediately: do my taxes, deposit my check and write bills, work on my class lists in the grading database, study my lesson plans for next week, work on a clients web site, study php so I can get a better job, work on the virtual elevator...until I thought NO!...I don't have to do any of these things. I can simply roll over and go back to sleep. I love Saturdays.

4-3-05
Spring quarter started last week on Thursday and I taught two of my classes before the weekend interceded. It looks like my new Photoshop class will be just fine. The previous instructor handed it over with an existing textbook, so I will simply follow along in his footsteps.
      The potential exists for me to toss out the old curriculum and rewrite it from scratch on a week by week basis. I could spend 10 hours every Saturday creating my own lesson plans in inDesign, then printing out the handouts for the Friday class. This would give me total control, and provide the students with the high quality step by step lesson plans they have become accustomed to in my classes. However, I'm finally getting smarter in my old age and have realized that I have better things to do on the weekends.
   I asked one of the other instructors if he spent long hours putting together lesson plans and he said no. Part of the reason why he doesn't need to create lesson plans is that his class works in a studio with cameras, and the lectures are very short. The class is mostly hands on learning with hardware, versus the long convoluted lessons I teach in creating digital imagery with software.
   He made a very good point when talking about the approach I take to teaching:

"You know, Mark, I think sometimes you give the students too much information, when it might actually be better for the students if you give them less in the way of lesson plans and let them do more discovery on their own."

"There is a lot of truth to that", I commented, thinking of the three years I've spent banging my head against the lesson plan wall. Which is why, I've decided to simply use the previous instructors lesson plans and text book. This frees up massive amounts of time on the weekend for me to study php programming, which is where the money is these days.

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