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Letters from an Artist

January, 2005

1-30-05
After paying most of the bills due at the first of the month, the paycheck that I received on the 25th is down to forty dollars. There were three more bills I was unable to pay: $175 to the electric company, $60 for water/homeowners dues and $160 for car insurance. Sue will be able to pay those on the 5th when she gets paid. Unfortunately she has some bills of her own (union fees and medical insurance) that will tap her check down to about $100. We will have to live on the $140 for 11 days. $14 dollars a day for a family of 4 with 3 commuting cars doesn't cut it.
     This is, of course, all related to replacing our old minivan with the new pickup truck. We bought the cheapest new toyota for sale, and it seemed like the smartest decision possible at the time. The bank thought we had plenty of money, and even I was amazed when I added up our paychecks. One hundred seventy four in car payments seemed, at least on paper quite do-able. In the back of my mind I knew that buying a brand new $174 toy each month would begin to quickly tap out our budget, but we had to replace the van which Sue had badgered me into selling (we sold it with 174k miles and an iffy transmission).
    What I hadn't considered was that they would decide half of my classes were 3 credit classes instead of 4 (we part timers get paid by the credit). Also, when the bank looked at our budget, I was teaching evening classes to the technical high school on top of my day classes. The money was great, but those kids required teaching skills I did not possess and I had to hand if off to someone else. Also, how was I to know that most of my freelance work would dry up? While puzzling over all of this yesterday I had an epiphany. If I get 7 weeks of time off a year without pay, and only work 4 days a week, 6 hours a day, that works out to my working just half of the hours I used to work when I worked as a printer or web designer eight hours a day, five days a week.

printer teacher
52 weeks year 45 weeks a year
5 days a week 4 days a week
8 hours a day 6 hours a day
254 working days a year 180 working days a year
2032 hours a year 1080 hours a year
$15 to $18 per hour I have to be a little deceptive, since this is a hot topic although teacher wages are on the public record.
$30,500 to $36,000 a year Let's just say I made about what a decent printer would make if he was working full time (teaching pays great for the "in classroom" hours)
working conditions:
very stressful very low stress, super supportive atmosphere
I'm always in trouble - too slow I'm a very popular teacher, people crowd into my classes, they know I will answer their questions.
quantity over quality quality over quantity
creativity is discouraged, get the widgets out the door creativity is an asset. Teachers are always thinking up new ways to reach out to challenging students. We change people's lives for the better.
Week nights and week ends are free, no homework. If you do work, you are paid overtime (time and a half) week nights: work 2 hours unpaid; weekends: work up to 10 hours, unpaid.

I guess the bottom line is that for me to stay in teaching, and still be able to pay my bills I have to find freelance work to replace the missing 1000 hours. Last quarter was bad because I had to spend 10 unpaid hours each week creating curriculum (writing the book) for the new class. This quarter has been easier, and in fact I've spend a couple of weekends indulging my art hobby, since my freelance work has dried up. I think I'll brush off my resume and prowl around a bit on Friday, my day off, see if anyone needs part time help.

Because I didn't want this entry to be a total downer, I've decided to include a list of:

Things I am thankful for:

  • my healthy body, not counting my ringing ear
  • I weigh 159 this morning
  • my healthy, hardworking, interesting and friendly family
  • our 3 dependable cars
  • our house, 6 years to go at $489 a month
  • my interesting part-time job
  • the cool drawings I've been doing in my "spare" time
  • my laptop, my wacom tablet and my cannon G5
  • My Martin guitar and my new harmonica

 

 

1-23-05
Sue and I were shopping in town today, had a major argument about the quickest way to get from the Tacoma Mall to the Tacoma Mountaineers building (near Annie Wright). She started hectoring me about my lousy navigating skills, it got blown way out of proportion and ended with me saying, "Fine! Drive your own D$@#m car! I'm not listening to this cr%p for one second longer." I pulled over, got my bike out and pedaled home, from downtown Tacoma, a distance of about 25 miles...in the rain. It felt good at first to be righteous, and outside, but it's such a long way home, and the hills...did I mention how many hills there are? I think we're fine now, sigh.

1-22-05
"You are very fortunate to have such a healthy colon," the white haired nurse said, as she wheeled my hospital gurney into my curtained cubicle. "Only one person in 5 has a colon like yours. Consider yourself very lucky!" I gave her a dreamy smile and drifted back into drug induced sleep in my cozy little cubicle.
    After all the gruesome preparation and nervous anticipation, my routine colonoscopy was a walk on the beach. The worst part of the process was drinking the golightly/nulightly solution that empties out the bowel. I had to drink a half gallon of the stuff within an hour. If it was beer, I could have handled it, but the chemical went down like orange flavored olive oil, and by the time I was down to the last pint I was sitting in the bathroom with my bowels on fire trying to get up the nerve to take another sip, never mind 4 more cups.
   By midnight I was out in the kitchen, attempting to read a book and trying not to fall asleep as I waited for the next bowel movement. They seemed to come every twenty minutes but I needed to sleep in order to get up in time for my 9 o'clock procedure. I was also substitute teaching that afternoon at 3 in the college Technical High School and needed my wits about me.
   I fell asleep soon enough but woke up at 6AM to find that my drugged body had taken matters into it's own hands. <sigh> Never liked that mattress anyway, too bad we don't have money to replace it.
   I think I might start another drawing today after I run some errands and review my lesson plans for next week. It's raining cats and dogs out there so this will be an "inside" weekend. My nerves are still shot after three days of substitute teaching in the technical high school. That is a challenging classroom.
    My regular classes are going quite well. I have some very bright students this quarter in every class. They are, almost without exception, determined to learn. I've taught all of these subjects before so I'm not drowning in lesson plans every weekend.  As far as job satisfaction, this quarter is as good as it gets, now if only I was making enough money to pay my bills, life would be rosy.
   Still, one learns to make due with what one has. As the old saying goes, "No sense beating yer head against the wall." I'm lucky to have exciting hobbies that are totally free. My art, my digital art and playing live music are enough to keep me entertained until I figure out what I want to be when I grow up.  

1-22-05
Recurring printing nightmare

As usual, I was walking into one of my old printing jobs, trying to get it back. There was a problem getting my car down the driveway, something about snow or deep mud. As I parked I began to feel the overpowering anxiety that always accompanies this dream. When I walked in the door I was disconcerted to see that the interior of the shop reflected all 9 of the print shops I'd worked in over the course of my long and non-star studded career as a pressman. All the machines were there being run by other people. I was unemployed of course, the usual scenario for this dream and feeling very unsure about my skills, not having printed in 4 years.
     George (my last foreman) was there along with several of his bosses plus Mike who was my boss at a shop down in Olympia. They were all busy printing up a storm. My old printing press was there waiting for me, but since I wasn't officially hired yet, I decided to do some maintenance.
   I turned it on to wash it up (someone had left the ink on the rollers) and quickly shut it back down. The star bars attached to the chain delivery grippers had come out of their holes in the chain and were whirling around with the chain, ready to pop loose at any time and cause a dreaded chain delivery crash. On this particular KORD Heidelberg printing press this crash costs about $13,000 to fix.
     After safely stopping the press I pulled one of the star bars out and discovered that the reason it wasn't staying safely mounted in its holes in the chain was that the spring loaded mounting posts had become gummed up with anti-offset powder. I put some solvent in a can, stuck the bar in the solvent and began pushing up and down on the bar to clean out the spring action. As I was doing this I heard one of my foremen across the room holler at me to just turn it on and not worry that the chain would self destruct.
   In the back of my mind I knew this was all a dream, yet some part of my mind wanted the dream to continue and kept extending the story line, adding more harassment from the bosses, more dilemmas on the press, jobs that needed running and deadlines missed.

Wonder why I keep having this dream? I'm relatively happy teaching, although the pay isn't quite as steady as a printing job. Perhaps that is why I have the dream. We are broke right now, down to our last twenty dollars to last 3 days. Sue gets very uneasy when she can't even buy a quart of milk. For me it's all a lark. I figure as long as we have rice to eat we'll survive. She usually borrows money from the kids when it gets this bad. They both have a few thousand in the bank and know we will pay them back on payday.
   I guess I shouldn't dwell too much on dreams, even if they are puzzling. One might as well wonder why the sun rises in the East, instead of the West. Today is Martin Luther King day and the fourth day of my long unpaid weekend. I finished my still life drawing of the rose, and I'm not sure if it's a good one. I probably need to buy a real rose and do a charcoal sketch of that so I understand how they are shaped before trying to make a silk rose look real.
    I think I'll start another drawing of a glass pitcher with the rose again, but this time I'll set it up so it appears to be on the edge of a table covered by a tablecloth with a dish towel hanging in the background. I love the combination of glass and drapery: one very soft and ethereal, the other hard and unyielding. One reflects light in hard points of brilliance, the other simply glows.
       It's great fun to draw these still life set ups. I rarely sell them, but they are so much fun to draw that I simply don't care. All the books I've read about art tell you to follow your muse. If you believe in yourself and develop your personal vision, eventually the market will respond. And if it doesn't...will, at least I entertained myself and created some lasting beauty along the way.

1-16-05
Kept thinking I ought to sit down and write in my journal, but life got in the way. This is Sunday, the third day of a 4 day weekend. Friday was an in-service day for faculty but I'm adjunct faculty and didn't have to attend while Monday is Martin Luther King day. As a teacher, I get about 7 weeks off a year, but I'm finding that all that unpaid time off has a huge impact on our budget.
    For example, I had 2 weeks off at xmas, and my last bi-weekly paycheck would have been zero but for an extra class I offered to teach in February, and for which I was paid in advance. Still, my paycheck was less than half what it normally would have been had I been working. The time off is great for pursuing my muse, but my muse doesn't pay the bills.
    I have been playing my guitar and my new harmonica regularly simply because it lifts my spirits. I have nice thick calluses on my fingers now and probably should call up my old jamming buddy for a session. Music, while fun has absolutely no potential for making money. Because of our budget situation I've spent more time on my artistic muse, hoping that one of my still life paintings will be sellable. I'm 12 hours into a pencil drawing of a sheet, a wine glass and a yellow rose. It's turning out nice, but doesn't draw the wide eyed WOW! looks from my family that signals a sellable drawing.
    I'm fortunate that my family is frank in their appraisal of my drawings. If something is exceptional they will tell me. If it isn't, they simply say: "Oh, that's nice." Still, I've not given up on the drawing. I am making subtle changes and improvements to the rendering of the glass, the drapery and the rose, hoping to lift it out of mediocrity. I love spending time with it, especially since it gives me the opportunity to listen to interesting talking books as I work. My mind sails away on the story as I carefully compare values and stroke the paper with my various pencils and erasers.
    On Thursday the traffic stopped as soon as I hit the freeway. There was no exit to bail on so I ground my teeth for half an hour until the first exit. The radio told me that someone had lost an axle up ahead and I decided to take the back roads up to the bridge, park the truck and pedal. It worked quite well, although pedaling in 32 degree weather was a shock to my lungs. After I'd come down off the bridge I exited to Bridgeport and began pedaling the long stretch out to the college. I knew it was an hour pedal, but I was due in my classroom in 40 minutes.
    Passing a bus stop it occurred to me that waiting for a bus might be quicker than pedaling. I got out my old schedule and sure enough, a bus was due in 5 minutes. I rode in comfort out to the transit center at the Lakewood mall, then hopped on my bike again for the 10 minute pedal to school. My students had been told I wouldn't make it until 9:30 so they were surprised to see me at ten after. Several were quite impressed that I put that much effort into getting to work on time. I guess I set a good example of a serious work ethic.
   On the way home it was cold, windy and dangerously dark. As I navigated the busy sidewalks back the transit center I tried to watch out for cars entering the streets, but it was really hard to keep track of all the traffic swirling around me. At one point I found myself approaching a YMCA parking lot exit where 5 cars were lined up entering traffic. I slowed down on the sidewalk, aware of the danger. A big SUV was next and I pedaled up cautiously, wondering if she could see me without a headlight on my bike and wearing my black rain parka. She had been inching forward, but as I got within a few feet of her she abruptly stopped, apparently seeing me.
    I pedaled out in front of her, still on the sidewalk, a foot from her bumper, her hood ornament level with my head. She began moving forward and I realized with a jolt of terror that she had stopped because a car was coming (and had now gone), not because she'd seen me. Her car accelerated, and I pumped with the desperation born of terror, clearing her bumper by millimeters. I think she might have finally stopped, but I didn't stop to look back.
   For the rest of the ride back I was much more careful and made it safely back to the truck parked on a wide spot in the road by the airport. Friday I surfed around a bit on the net and found a nice little $25 bicycle headlight made by cateye with 5 LED's and a 100 hour burn time on 4 AA cells. Saturday I picked up some prescription drugs for my upcoming routine colonoscopy and found myself with $50 to my name, 10 days away from my next paycheck. I've really got to do something about this cash flow problem. I love teaching and the free time it allows me, but I'm not sure I can afford it for much longer.

1-7-05
Finished the first week of the new quarter. This time around I'm teaching an advanced Illustrator/Photoshop class, Intermediate Flash, Dreamweaver and "Introduction to Illustrator". It's quite a responsibility to have this many people looking to me for answers. I'm not a genius by any definition of the word, however, I do try to prepare for any question that may come up. I always miss a few, but by and large I can answer most questions my students ask.
      What's more important than having all the answers is that I try to keep a fun atmosphere in the classroom, without getting carried away of course. My long years of experience in the workforce have taught me that a little humor goes a long way. Maintaining discipline in the classroom, while still making it a fun place to learn requires one to skate a fine line, but I think I'm getting better at it judging by the comments I hear through the grapevine.
    Software knowledge doesn't always come easy for our students. Some of these programs are so bizarre I can only compare them to learning to play a musical instrument. You cannot play beautiful music the first time you pick up a new instrument, yet some of my more ambitious students expect to create beauty in the first couple hours with a new program. I feel their frustration, but they simply have to bear down and study, trusting that they will be able to climb this learning curve as they have climbed many others.
     My brother and my sister are getting increasing concerned about our aging parents. I've kind of grown old with them and wasn't too alarmed by the gradual decline. My brother called me up a week ago telling me that he and my sister were going to drive over here for an intervention with the folks, giving them a deadline of a couple months to move into a managed care facility. I was kind of shocked by this as I've not noticed the folks changing that much for the worse compared to 5 years ago.
   Apparently when they travel their personal care suffers and people notice. We almost always see them at home where they are able to stay on top of things. I made some calls to confirm what I was hearing from my siblings and heard mixed reviews. After gathering as much information as I could I decided not to participate in the "intervention", considering it premature.
   Without my participation they decided to put off the intervention but told me I had a week to deal with it or they would drive over. They've both chosen to live in far away cities: Spokane and Eugene, Oregon, which has made me and Sue the closest family. I was afraid that seeing all their kids show up out of the blue could cause dad more harm than benefit. I called my aunt (dad's sister) and she agreed. Dad prides himself on his ability to manage his life, despite being in his early eighties.
        To Sue and I, they are our best and longest friends. We see them at irregular intervals: every few weeks, sometimes as long as two months, but generally speaking we see them much more than my siblings who come over at Thanksgiving for 6 hours, and might visit once or twice during the summer.
   Dad loves to canoe out on Puget Sound, and mom usually comes along, although getting in and out of the canoe has become an ordeal as she gets older. I drove down there last week and spilled the beans to dad: showing him the long email trail that had generated the crisis phone call from my brother, and explaining to him that people had been noticing things about them when they travel.
     He candidly admitted that they had some issues I wasn't aware of and promised to take care of them in the next couple weeks, as soon as he has taken care of mom's sore throat problem.
    Sue talked to him yesterday and he seems to be following through. It scares me to see them getting this old. I know that everything they are going through is in store for me in 30 years, assuming I am lucky enough to live that long.
      One of my friends at school told me that he had gone to a funeral of a 48 year old friend of his over the holiday break. The guy had been a physical fitness buff and did everything right. He had a stable marriage, happy kids, a great job, didn't smoke or drink to excess and saw his doctor for regular check ups.
  Between one yearly physical and the next, he developed incurable prostate cancer. They told him he had 2 months to live. He made it three years and died last month. I guess there simply aren't any guarantees in this life. I've heard some great old saying about dealing with this dilemma on a day to day basis. One of my favorites goes something like this: "Live each day as if it was your last, but plan as if you will live forever."

 

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"Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone."
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