It’s been a bit of a bummer summer for me here in the Pacific Northwest. The chilly, dismal weather throughout much of June and July definitely affected my overall mood, in addition to a couple failed job searches and house drama. Now that August has brought hot, sunny weather to Olympia, I’m busy finishing teaching my summer class and frantically preparing lesson plans for the fall quarter. Throughout the upcoming academic year, I will be teaching three classes each quarter on two different campuses while still acting as the technician for the printmaking studio half time. Yes, I am crazy. However for the next 10 months, I am planning on saving approximately 50% of my income for Future Plans, come hell or high water.
I’m also planning monthly adventures to preserve my sanity during the school year. The first adventure is a road trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend Tamarind Institute’s Fabulous at Fifty Symposium and Conference. Long time readers and friends know how much I absolutely ADORE New Mexico. As excited as I am for the conference, I’m more excited to spend some time driving through the desert. I’ll be camping along the way which means stargazing galore! I hope to be on the road for a week and a half or so, and when I return to Olympia, it’ll already be advising week for the new campus gig. October, November and December’s adventures have yet to be determined, but a holiday in Buffalo with family is in the works as well as a relaxing long weekend at Breitenbush Hot Springs in Oregon. February brings the annual CAA conference in New York City, which will undoubtedly be amazing and re-energizing (couches, friends?). March is a friend’s wedding in Death Valley, California – another weekend of desert camping.
Ultimately all these mini-trips will lead up to a (hopefully) month long adventure in Peru next summer, the main destination being Machu Picchu. I have never traveled out of the country (with the exception of Canada and we all know that doesn’t count). Machu Picchu has always fascinated me; the images of the ancient Incan ruins located on an artificially terraced mountain side look like something I could only have imagined in dreams. I am currently looking for interested traveling buddies, so if you’re interested in spending time in Peru, you know where to reach me.
In the meantime, Little Wings at Northern. Man, I love Little Wings. Album recommendation of the day: Light Green Leaves.
I’m finally uploading images of the opening for Better Place Than Now from a little over a month ago. The show was a total success and it’s just the beginning for the body of work I’m currently researching, “Dead Wrestlers.” The awesome Conor Peterson also showed his large format photographs of quiet, desolate yet developed landscapes.
Me: Digital prints and drawing. The prints are highly pixelated, online video grabs, so they look slightly out of focused when photographed. The drawing of Miss Elizabeth is the first layer of a hand-drawn CMYK pattern. The image is from wrestling trading cards I collected as a kid in the mid 80s – early 90s. You can read more from an earlier post.
Conor Peterson: archival inkjet prints from large format negatives.
The Opening: Friends, food and fun!
Conor, gesticulating wildly with a snappy red tie.
As I contemplate living in Washington another year, my sixth, I can’t help but think about ideas of history and place.
The house I currently live in was constructed in 1908. Throughout the 1920s and into the early 60s, it served as a dormitory for Catholic nuns trained as nurses who tended the sick and infirm at St. Peter’s Hospital, located across the street. The original St Peter’s hospital was founded in 1887 by Mother Joseph of The Sacred Heart, one of the many Catholic funded hospitals and schools she founded that helped settle and establish the west. In 1919, however, the original hospital was forced to relocate to make way for the new Capitol Campus. St Peter’s was rebuilt with state of the art technology and again opened its doors to the people of Olympia in 1927. St. Pete’s served as a bastion of hope through the dark days of the Great Depression, both World Wars and the turmoil of Vietnam. In the mid-70s, the hospital was incorporated into one of the first and largest state-wide health collectives in the nation, Group Health, and opened a new facility on the outlying eastern border of the city, where I receive the majority of my health care as an employee of the state. The old St Pete’s building across the street now houses a multitude of efficiency apartments.
My house, the nuns’ dormitory, was purchased in the late 70s by a group of young, visionary radicals anxious to partake in co-housing social experiments of the time; it has existed as a collective since: The Alexander Berkman Collective, or the ABC House. In the infinite wisdom of the generations of hippies, eco-terrorists, musicians, artists, anarchists and political organizers whom lived under this roof over the years (or hid in the basement), the original floral pattern wallpaper throughout the house was not allowed to be painted over. The wallpaper is hand screen-printed, a technique that went out of fashion in the 1940s. Although the paper is yellowed with age, scuffed, cracked and stained, I know this pattern of large, colorful flowers I look at every morning and every night is the same embellished bouquet that has been gazed upon every morning and every night for at least the last 70 years. There’s a certain kind of comfort there, found in the intersection of history, place and one’s small contribution to each in the appreciation of details.
Saturday started off with Shipwreck Day, a huge outdoor junk sale that spans the streets of downtown Anacortes. I bought a cedar stump cub head that was made with a chainsaw by this fellow. I was his first sale of the day. The cub was $15 dollars. The thought of my parents opening up their gift in the mail: priceless.
In the early afternoon, a group of increasingly sunburned kids decided to visit nearby Deception Pass, the bridge that connects Whidby Island to Fidalgo Island. To say it was beautiful would be an understatement. I want to go camping here in the fall.
From there, it was a short ride to take in the view from Mt. Erie…
Washington is fucking breathtaking. But then you get weird shit like this:
That night was the final Port Warehouse show. I was mostly excited to see Karl Blau, and I was not disappointed. This was easily the most memorable set I’ve seen him play over the last few years. LAKE was his backing band.
On Sunday morning, I woke up at 6:53 AM. I was immediately awake and there was little hope of falling back asleep. Therefore, I decided to go for a lone drive, exploring Anacortes. I followed the coast line through town, ultimately ending up at jaw dropping Washington Park. The Fog was thick and the salty spray of Puget Sound gave me the distinct impression of Autumn.
View of the bluff from the beach…
The edge of the world…
The view of the ocean from the bluff…
On the way back downtown, I came across this incredible sight. Apparently, decades ago, a Croatian sailor decided to create a marina by dredging the bottom of the cove out and placing it in an old grounded cargo vessel. Birds soon inhabited the man-made island, dropping seeds into the soil, over time creating a small forest.
I was back in time for the final Sunday afternoon show in the park, then headed home to Olympia in time for a later dinner and an early bed time.
I found this drawing some time ago on the sidewalk downtown. It might have been outside of Northern. The place escapes me. I’ve had it pinned to my bulletin board for months.
Today, I share it with you.
Off to What The Heck Fest, my unofficial beginning of summer and the official start of my 11 day vacation.
I’ve been reading a few money blogs recently, thanks to the lovely Sarah Cass. I have always been very good with the green stuff since my family didn’t have any while I was growing up. I can honestly say I know what government cheese tastes like. (It tastes like the color yellow.) Therefore, I always have a certain amount of anxiety surrounding my financial situation, and also a lot of jealousy surrounding those peers who have the benefit of well-off parents, grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles or aunts. I constantly struggle with class-ism, which is why I suppose I gravitated toward to most proletariat art, printmaking.
I consider myself fairly frugal person. I live cheaply in a collective house, I have decent paying jobs, I don’t have expensive vices and I live way within my means. This allows my to put at least 25% of my monthly earnings into a savings account every month, while still paying off my student loan and leaving a little extra for much needed cultural getaways to the the metropolises of Portland and Seattle. It took a long time to get to a place of being in control of my money instead of it controlling me. In high school, I worked my ass off so when I got to college, I had scholarships as well as need based aid (government cheese) to finance tuition and expenses. In my sophomore and junior years of college, I worked as a Resident Assistant so I received my room and board for free. I went to a fantastic state school that was neatly plopped on and integrated into a private red bricked campus in the southerntier valley of New York State. I was the first person in my entire extended family to go to college, so I vigilantly researched schools and their affiliated costs until I found the program that fit me and my family’s limited budget. After college, I spent the summer working in the fields of a landscaping plant nursery, saved approximately $1000, packed up my car and cat and hit the road for Portland. That’s another story. Those years in Portland were financially rocky. I lived from paycheck to paycheck and used my credit card for emergencies. I had a lot of emergencies.
Then I decided to go to grad school, which was financed with scholarships and US subsidized government loans. Financially speaking, living was relatively easy (which reminds me – one day soon I’m going to write a post titled something like “So You Think You Want An MFA,” a realistic reference for those students who think they can avoid real life by hiding behind art). Anyway, you can check out the archives from the later part of 2004 to read more about those years. Yikes.
When my car broke down five years ago upon moving to Olympia, not knowing any better, I assumed I had to buy a new one. I chose the cheapest new car I could find. At a little over 12K, it was the biggest purchase I had ever made in my life. (I will differentiate my idea of purchase from investment a little later.) When I was signing the paperwork over at The Olympia Auto Mall (yes, this is what it is really called), the financing agent tried to tack on a $250 re-selling clause which he argued would save me money when I wanted to trade in the car in a couple years.
“I guarantee you will not be driving this car in five years,” he said. “You’re going to want to upgrade. Trust me.”
I had been trained from birth not to trust car salesmen by my father. “Is that a sales tactic you learned at school? Make the buyer feel remorse before she even signs her name on the title?” I asked. He promptly shut his mouth and I read through the rest of the paperwork in silence, slowly, as he had previously assured me that I “didn’t really need to read through this stuff. It’s just legal mumbo jumbo.” He squirmed uncomfortably in his pleather chair for the next 15 minutes. I’m pretty sure when we rose to shake hands at the end of the paperwork marathon, he left ass sweat on the seat.
I paid off that car in 2 1/2 years. It took a lot of hard work. (Also, in August, I will have had that car for five years. I don’t need your fancy Elantra, Hyundai!) Debt is demoralizing. I once thought debt was a “necessary evil,” as so many people once liked to say. Now, I know debt is just evil (as hopefully does the rest of the modernized world). Last summer, I finally became credit card debt free. The air never tasted so fresh in my lungs. Then, after two months of easy breathing, I decided I needed a laptop. A fancy laptop. “For school,” I said. That fancy laptop had the debt gestation period of a human child, and I lugged that number with me for nine months. I also racked up debt over the winter on various other obsessions, like art from 20X200 limited edition prints. I bought a Kate Bingaman-Burtmixtape print (mine was white on orange) and I just got a HUGE AMAZING PRINT from the Hamilton Wood type Museum, which I plan on making a pilgrimage to this summer. The laptop was a purchase, the art was an investment.
Paying for school is also an investment, which is why I don’t feel like I lug my student debt with me in quite the same fashion as I lugged around the $1,800 laptop debt. When something is purchased, money (read: your time and hard work) is traded for material goods which will depreciate in value over time. When I use my money as an investment, I receive limitless returns for my time and hard work. When I buy art, I get to look at it every day. I have so much art, I redecorate constantly (though I do have favorites). I feel creative and inspired when I look at art. I wonder. I contemplate. School teaches you how to wonder and contemplate in a more sophisticated fashion. And, if you’re lucky like I was, you learn to love the wonder. So school was also a good investment for me.
Now, for the second time in a year, I’m out of debt once again.
Basically, this post has been a summation of the financial lesson it’s taken me 31 years to learn: Your money has power and if you use this power for good, you invest in yourself, your friends, your community and your future. When you use your powers poorly, you end up with worthless junk and useless materialistic addictions.
The next lesson in my lifetime financial planner, casually penned by John Darnielle, is balancing those things I do for money and those things I do for love, love, love.
The past couple have months have marked the beginning of a radical shift in personal perspective. On all fronts, it feels as if things are changing. Changing in ways they have to, have needed to, for a very long time. A cosmic kick in the ass, perhaps? Who knows. Regardless, things are falling apart in ways that are simultaneously terrifying and exciting.
This piece of advice, given to me recently by old friend Pete, neatly sums up my current life dilemma: don’t burn bridges until you are sure you’re 75% the way across.
That said, here are my new life priorities in numerical order:
1. Make work. Art. I need to make stuff above everything else I do in life. I’m miserable when I’m not able to get my ideas onto paper in a visual way. Sorry, blog. Lists don’t cut it.
2. Find another job. Yup. Time to move on. I am stagnating, beginning to get fungus of the brain. The Olympia chapter of my life is over.
3. Start a press. Renegade Cascade Editions is officially getting off the ground. Watch for my etsy site this summer.
4. Continue growing as a teacher. Not only does this (somewhat) financially sustain me, I enjoy it immensely. Go figure.
That’s it, friends. If it doesn’t fall on my list, expect a slow, unconcerned response. I am no longer willing to overextend myself for unappreciative others at the cost of my life passions and creative visions.
This past week, I received my final rejection letter of the first tier application season from The University of Pittsburgh. Even though I knew I had been rejected from the search several months ago when I failed to hear anything from the school, something about holding the physical letter in my hand momentarily solidified a deep feeling of failure and hopelessness. Even though all the positions I applied for had pools of 200 – 300 applicants, I was still hoping for something. Skowhegan had over 2,500 applicants for their summer program admitting only 65! In the next several months, I will continue to watch for position announcements and join the scrambling masses grasping at the final straws of visiting faculty lines and emergency hires. However, it does look like I’m going to be stuck in Olympia for another year. AHHHHHHHH!!!!! As I get older, it’s becoming more and more difficult to imagine starting entirely over in a new city without a job, prospects, friends or support.
In addition, I picked up one course a quarter at the local community college starting in Fall. Therefore, I will be teaching three classes a quarter next year, two at Evergreen and one at the community college, and I will continue to be the instructional support staff at Evergreen for 20 hours a week. I really wish I could just drop that gig and focus only on teaching but I get all my benefits and health insurance from staffing. I’ll continue teaching drawing, printmaking and 2D design foundation type courses, always with a healthy smattering of art history and art appreciation elements. If I can’t train artists, I will train future patrons of the arts. That’s what I tell myself anyway.
On the home front, I’m moving on up in the world… to the second floor that is. At the end of the month, I’m moving into a very large upstairs bedroom that looks out into the backyard. It’s more than double the size of my room now and in celebration, I bought an awesome retro chrome and Formica table and chair set off craigslist. I’m excited not to have anyone clomping around above me, more room to have a real office space , and a table to spread all my school work on. The room also gets AMAZING light in the afternoon. Although I’m sad to see some of the long-term ABC housemates move out, I’m excited about the collective re-envisioning process that will happen in the house over the next several months. The house is temporarily going down to five housemates instead of six to see how that affects the Collective’s dynamics (and our budget).
Needless to say, I am desperately looking forward to summer. I have plenty of new ideas for work bubbling over onto the burner… I just need some free time to stir the pot, you know? Sun, swimming, napping under the black walnut tree… these things too will be most excellent. June can’t get here fast enough.
And, because I’ve had a few requests (BTW the magic number was 18):
