fall
Song of the Day: That Day – Poe
I woke up this morning, and the breeze coming through my window from the grey sky outside smelled like fire. Even when it’s sunny, the shade has a bite to it. The night is getting colder. They’re serving pumpkin yogurt at the frozen yogurt place. This is how we know it’s fall.
Fall makes me feel busy. It’s the beginning of the school year, and though I’m no longer in school, it makes me think of beginning things over. New schedules and activities. New priorities. Time to learn new things. In the past year, I think I’ve learned a lot, but it’s hard to know when you don’t have a syllabus on which to look back. I’ve written no papers, I can’t remember how many books I’ve read, and I couldn’t even really tell you what I did in any satisfying way.
It has been over two years since I’ve graduated from college. It has been a rough two years, and I don’t feel like I have a lot to show for it. I always wanted to be an artist. When I was a sculpture major, I used to say I was majoring in possibilities. It was clear from the lectures from visiting artists, from my professors, and from critiques that art could be anything and anywhere and involving anyone. I learned of artists whose medium was conversation. I learned of people who created great collaborations and mechanisms for making art that were amazing. I learned to see the cracks in everything, and view the world as a seething ball of potential, just waiting to be manipulated by me, the artists.
The other side to that was the art world. I learned about gatekeepers like curators, and the old boys club of art-making. I learned how Andy Warhol changed after his first major opening. I learned about talent, and influence, and corruption. I learned how little artists earned to live on, I learned how competitive the art market was, how if you wanted to be an artists you had to move to NY city, and how the more conceptual your art was, the less it was sold, the less galleries were interested in you, the less you made. “You have to have ambition,” my advisor told me. She had a show in New York where her pieces were selling for more than $60k each.
After school, I didn’t know what to do. I had this big idea for a project, based on a story I’d heard about another sculptor. The exact details have long escaped my memory, but this is what I remember. In the 50s, in a place like Austria, this artist went door to door, offering a piece of art in exchange for room and board. It worked, and he got his start that way. I read Travels with Charlie. Growing up in the Bay Area, and experiencing the vast differences in culture between East Coast and West Coast, Spain, and France, made me realize how different the rules of daily life are, depending on where you are. I wanted to check out all of these places. I wanted to make a slow trip through all the backroads, making art in exchange for my livelihood along the way.
I graduated, and summer came. I got a job at the video store where I rented movies growing up. It was fun, easy, and paid nothing. Halfway through the summer I was to go up to Canada and spend two weeks with my best friend. We had the best time, camping on islands off Vancouver Island. When I got back, my best friend from high school asked me to come with her on a trip throughout South America, expenses paid. I got some shots and we traveled for three weeks, visiting Machu Pichu, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Quito. It was amazing.
When I got back, the prospect of living at home with my dad and working at the video store was grim, and both my friends were moving to Seattle for work and school. I came along and spent the year working in a gift shop, dj-ing at this amazing online radio station, and making my own little projects go. But I felt lost. I was broke most of the time. I didn’t have a community surrounding me. I was out of school for the first time in my life and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought I had to continue the education that I have received, and was always sad that I couldn’t recreate the same intensity. I couldn’t get the same amount of activity from myself as I had in the past.
I felt shitty. It rained a lot. I fought with my best friend. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I wanted to go somewhere. I felt isolated. Existential crises seemed to rule my life and my brain.
I didn’t understand it. No one tells you how hard it is to transition to the real world after college. In school, everyone is trying to help you. There are tons of programs that provide you with resources. There are many amazing, motivated, talented, and brilliant people around you all the time.
In the real world, everything is different. Everyone must fend for themselves. There isn’t as much cooperation between people. People don’t talk to each other as much, and the things they discuss aren’t nearly as interesting overall. There are always exceptions to this rule, but people are basically too busy trying to survive to focus on those other things. It has always been this way. This is why the rich have so much power: money and time.
It’s hard to go from living in a magical fantasyland where anything seemed possible, to living in a world where you have to struggle to feed yourself and keep yourself housed and clothed. I didn’t realize what a challenge it would be to do these things.
When I decided to move back to California, the economy was tanking. I had fallen in love, and I was working two jobs to save money for the move. I imagined we’d land at my dad’s house, get jovs, and move into the city straight away. But, my sister was pregnant, and she and her husband moved into dad’s house. We both moved in on the same day. I applied to job after job, without even a whisper of interested. I finally got a terrible job serving entitled rich white people. My boyfriend got a job at a packaging store. We worked, him too much, me too little. We were miserable.
It has been a rough year. With so many people unemployed, it seems useless to even apply for things. I have been depressed. I have gained weight. But I’m trying to toughen up. I’m trying to create my own business. I’m trying to take care of myself as best I can, and get a tighter grasp on all those things that make me happy. I try and listen to more music. I’m trying to dance more. I’m trying to connect with my friends, and be more involved in some kind of community.
I am just starting, and it is hard. All my ideas of what life is supposed to be like, and who I am, have been changing. Once, someone said to me that the best wine come from vines which have suffered. Bad weather, wind, drought, flood, all of these things that tax the vines make the grapes richer. The experience makes the wine more complex, more interesting, more satisfying to the taste. I keep trying to think of this place as temporary, of this darker time in my life as something that is just starting to end. Things will turn around, as they do. I can still make things happen, and I shouldn’t stop trying.
