1045 More Days

It was never my intention in the first place.

Nine years ago, my high school art teacher offered me a teacher's assistant position. One of the only times in my life in which I haven't been hesitant to undertake a new extracurricular, I think. Most of the work was simply doing bookkeeping and hanging up the artwork of students whose semester-long careers as artists had already come to a close. The following semester, I wouldn't have the proper study hall periods to continue. However, when the time came to renew or reject my position, he offered me an unusual compromise.

In the future, he had planned to teach a unit on Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, the two most common programs in the graphic design industry. He knew of my fondness for computers, and informed me that if I signed up for a higher level art course, I wouldn't have to do any work and he would reward me with an automatic A. The exchange being that I would spend each class period teaching myself how to use Photoshop and Illustrator so that I might teach him at the end of the semester, presumably when I had figured it all out. So of course I did it. Free A, right?

I went to Carroll College for video game design. The exciting new major was promised by my admissions advisor. When I arrived my freshman year, my actual advisor informed me that this major wasn't being offered until the following year, and that in the meantime, I should just take software engineering classes, since most will overlap anyway. I had no interest in programming; my main focus was going to be on designing the games. When my second year arrived, the fledgling program barely took off, and I was told that the design aspect of the course was "something they were thinking about in the future." For now, they were concentrating on programming. Even being extremely dissatisfied with it, I stuck with it until the game design major was disbanded at the end of the year.

Suddenly I had to select another major out of the ones that were available at Carroll. Transferring wasn't something I wanted to deal with. I went over to graphic design. I had the experience of working with it in high school, and I knew it was something I could perform decently and I was intrigued enough to continue. The decision was rather rushed, and ultimately it felt like I was just putting a band-aid over the wound.

I stuck with it, and I graduated in pretty good time considering I had to start over mostly from scratch my junior year. I even had the time to double minor in art and theology. I immediately found work... and hated it. It was so psychologically demoralizing that my hatred for it was impossible to hide. While searching for a new job, I stumbled across an ad for MY job. So I quit, rather than get fired. I was offered my a job at a friend's place of employment afterwards. Despite the constant drama and poor management there, I didn't hate it quite so much. I stuck around for the better part of a year, until they laid me off essentially so they could hire their friend (I found out later.)

Then I found my current job. It's pretty easy, and I have a lot of freedom. I was hired to work exclusively on a project that is so gargantuan in its undertaking that when the project comes to a close it will be just short of 2013. In addition, two of the eight people in my department are planning on retiring at that point. As far as graphic design goes, I feel as though this job is best-case-scenario. Regardless, I still don't find myself terribly fond of it.

Now that I've begun my curriculum to get my dog-training certification, I've felt a tremendous sense of relief lately. The last item on my task list for this giant project has a due date of December 7th, 2012. After that point, my job isn't guaranteed. My certification should be done early next year. I can make significantly more money as a dog-trainer than as a graphic designer, even at the start. Depending how much I charge per hour and how much business I get, I could make up to about $170,000 a year, not even working 40 hours a week. But I could also make $0 if I get no business.

My immediate plan is to use that two years to hopefully build a client base and see how much interest there is in my services at that point. If I feel like I can live on dog-training alone, I would be glad to never touch graphic design ever again.

1045 more days until I get to start over again. I can't wait.

Recognition!

A while back I had been uploading the vast majority of my "good" photography to deviantArt. The problem I had been having was that I would upload a photo, and people would only take a gander at it during the 5 minutes or so it would appear on the "just uploaded" page. Then it would disappear into the abyss and no one would ever find it again. I backed off of uploading my work for a while, if for no other reason than it seemed inconsequential.

For some reason, this weekend marked a change for me. I don't really know what caused it, but something clicked in my head and I got this tremendous urge to work on uploading my photos again. I caught up to the point that I had intended to in the first place, and on deviantArt's navbar I discovered a wonderful little button called "Groups."

I hadn't honestly paid too much attention before, but one of the groups therein is called GetWatchers. I give them the link to one of my pieces of artwork, and they start to show me the artwork of all the other hundreds of people who have sent them links as well. For each of these pieces that I look at, they show my art to someone else. Meaning that if I look at the art of 200 people, I get 200 views in return.

The result has been a raging success! I've attracted more viewers to my deviantArt site than ever before, and I would highly recommend any fellow deviants out there to showcase any of your work that hasn't met with the light of day for a while. In the meantime, here are a couple of my photos for those of you who aren't familiar with my work.

And of course, the main link to my deviantArt page is here. I'm all lonely there, so friend me if you feel moved!


Powerlines at Sunset 4 by *sameyer716 on deviantART


Marsh Beneath Golden Sky 1 by *sameyer716 on deviantART


Fiery Sunset 2 by *sameyer716 on deviantART

The First Major Hang-Up.

Prior to investing in my dog-training course, I took a mental inventory of any dogs that might be available for me to work with. I am holding off on purchasing a dog of my own until I have the money to properly take care of it. My parents' dog is getting very old, and I am sad to say that I can't even guaranty he'll still be with us by the end of the year. My good friend PJ is the only friend of mine who is a dog-owner, but unfortunately he lives about an hour and a half away. PJ's dog being my best option, I asked for permission to practice with his dog Maverick, and I can make the lengthy drive on a day that I may have free.

Upon receiving the paperwork for my coursework, I noticed that I should have paid better attention. Turns out, the last couple months of my dog-training certification require a mentorship. The mentorship portion of the course requires me to bring a dog along that I can practice with, and the mentor that will be chosen for me is going to be near MY home. Think about this for a moment.

That means on every day that I would need to bring the dog somewhere, I would have to drive to PJ's house, pick up his dog, drive back to my mentor, drive back up to PJ's to drop his dog off, and then come back home. This equates to an approximate of six hours of driving per day. Keeping the dog in my apartment overnight would cause undue stress to the dog by being kept in an environment he's not use to, and would make training difficult. I've asked my program advisor if it would be possible for them to choose my mentor based on being near PJ's home instead of my own, but she didn't really give me a clear answer.

Over this last weekend, my parents went to my cousin's college graduation party. His younger brother, evidently, is the owner of a 2 year old Beagle who is "sort-of" trained, and they offered to let me use him for this mentorship part. I will probably pursue this option, but I do have a couple of hang-ups with it.

First of all, the owner of the dog, my pre-teen cousin Michael, isn't somebody that I've had a tremendous amount of respect for. Michael, when he was a kid, was the type of kid whom you would consider a bully. He suffers from an extreme lack of discipline. Michael would pick on weaker kids, start fights, and get into tons of trouble at school. Evidently, when most adults, even school officials, tried to get him to behave, he threatened them with calling child protective services and would have lied about them hitting him. The last few family get-togethers have been peaceful, but for several years prior to that, he would spend every Christmas and Easter punching me repeatedly, trying to instigate fights.

Again, I think he's gotten all that kind of behavior out of his system now. He's been doing better in school and he's been a lot quieter the last couple times I've seen him. It's still a worry in my head though.

Poison Girl

She’s really starting to become a liability.

I don't know where we had our falling out, but I don't like it. I miss talking to you. I miss hanging out. It's so much harder for me when I have no clue what happened. Please talk to me Scott. Write me back. Let me know what I did so I can fix this cause my heart is very sad that we don't talk anymore :(

It’s come down to that I suppose. About a year ago, when I was single, I went out a couple times with a woman named Crystal that I went to high school with. She was the type of girl who terrifies my mother, riddled with facial piercings and obnoxious body tattoos, with the kind of emotional fangs that run venom straight to your heart. Simply put, she strung me along for almost two months, and when the dust had settled, all she had done is use me as a foil to get her physically abusive ex-fiancé to propose to her a third time.

So naturally I moved on. I’d like to believe the world is simple enough to let bygones be bygones and walk away without incident. Believe me. Things were quiet for a while. Since then, I’ve met the love of my life, Lia. Our relationship glistens like a jewel in a sea of stones. The eight months we’ve spent together has been healthy and strong and there is no doubt in my mind that she is the one.

Realizing her foolishness, Crystal soon broke up with her ex-fiancé (again.) And so, she’s picked from her mind a bouquet of messages that make me physically shake with anger. She lets me know that she’s dreaming about me, that she still wants to hang out, and assorted other snippets, prodding me to take notice of the fact that she made a mistake not choosing me. Most come across as though she’s pretending that we DO have a relationship; some rampant charade that apparently dwells within her subconscious.

I’ve done my best to cast it aside up until this message today. Allow her some sort of dignity of quitting on her own, dredged from my silence. Hopefully realizing how she used me and why I want no part of her drama any longer.

I hope my bite stings even worse.

About that time again.

I can't honestly say why I'm starting this again.

I've started blogs before. Quite a number in fact. Long, long ago I started an account with Xanga on a whim. It turned out to be nothing further than a few years worth of incessant rants from a sugar-addled high school student at 2 am. I abandoned it midway through college. Partly because of disinterest and partly because it attracted the ire of a vindictive ex-girlfriend.

At some point I picked it up again. This time trying to jump on the trend both feet first. I don't think that's a real expression, but I can live with that. I tried to double post (and sometimes even triple post) between Facebook, Myspace, and LiveJournal. This new generation of blogs cast a pall over the dissonant ramblings of their ancestors, favoring instead the angsty, profane and complacent writing style I used at the time. Admittedly, I feel like it was more of a bid to invite the curious into my world, where I might entrap some of the onlookers to gawk a bit longer. Few did.

As college ended, I funneled any desire to write into four girthy, bitter memoirs of each of the four years of my college experience, two broken relationships, times I wouldn't trade for all the world and times I never want to live through again. But as one can expect, wrestling a behemoth into submission takes a toll on a man. And so I quit writing for a while.

I've always wanted to return to this world, of fake words written on a fake page. But inspiration didn't truly hit me until a wise friend planted that urge to write back into my head. I recently signed myself up for classes to become certified in dog training, a dream of mine for years now, and he suggested I start a blog to document that process. I can't promise you that's what this blog is going to become. Hell, at first I didn't even think I was really going to do it. Something about opening back up to the world again has me hooked at the moment.

This time around, I suppose I'm not here to make friends, or burn off a moderate sugar rush, or shout a long-winded story from a dark room that nobody's listening to.

I guess, this time, I'm here for me.