mas

so i did some stuff today.

i had an interview...?today for a construction job. i just rode in a truck with a guy who was showing me a few places he was working on and after he had gone through his list of questions he said "well thats it, interviews over" and jokingly i said " im hired" and he agreed, telling me that i was hired before i even got in the truck. neat! but i still have an actual interview for another place tomorrow. Im sure that i wont be working at this other place though, seeing as how i would be getting higher pay starting off at the construction place and how i have more experience in the construction business than i do working at an insurance place.

after getting back from my little snowy ride around the city, i felt like making something or painting or drawing. i think i actually felt like drawing on cardboard, so i did. Doug had showed me a couple boxes i could use to paint on. You might be thinking "wow is that the best he could do? cardboard?" and you might also not be thinking anything cause you arent reading this...cause NO ONE reads this thing but me, and i dont even read it really! i just kinda write in it, sometimes. But anyway, he was being very helpful. I told him that i wanted to create a series out of a few piece i already have which are paintings on cardbaord and that i need more.

last week or so i was in the car with camille, we were driving back from dropping my mother off at her house. I kinda blurted out to camille that i wish we had had maybe a little more guidance or resources when we were younger. I felt like camille rita and myself all had a great ability to acomplish a lot at a young age, but werent given the resources or taken to much of an interest in. i told her that maybe if we had a piano at the house i would have been playing a lot by the time i was ten. it suddenly accured to me that all three of us seemed to have been good at almost anything we tried. Camille was very bright, finding her way to MIT at the end of high school. Rita did very well in school too, she was very smart, got good grades, and was an awesome athlete. Camille did sports too, but i feel like rita had a bit more ability in athletics than camille. camille worked hard to get her grades, but not as hard as rita had to work. and vis versa for athletics. Camille worked hard in basketball and track, but she was never going to be as good as rita ended up being. I feel like rita just excelled at anything she picked up, playing volleyball in the winter, for a very very good marcellus volleyball team, a team that usually went undeafeated. she also picked up tennis and thinking about it now, i almost want to laugh at how awesome it is that she played tennis and was great at it. I think she was just about the best singles player on the team. And then of course she did track. She was always a pretty good thrower, doing shot and disk, but it wasnt until senior year when she started to get a little more confidence in herself that she made some leaps and bounds. she ended up going to states and being one of the best throwers in the highschools history. both camille and rita were outstanding musicians as well. camille first chair flute and rita first chair clarinette. I felt like i was kind of the dud, i didnt do great in school. i was pretty average. i was pretty good at art though i suppose. I was interested in drawing ever since i was about 2 i think. being an artist was probably one of the first things that i hoped to one day become. that and a ninja. it wasnt until the end of highschool and start of college that i realized i could control my abilities pretty well. that is, i felt like i had the ability to pick up anything and excelle at it. i adopted a mentality that i wasnt being arrogant but rather exploring what people are capable of acomplishing, thinking that if someone in the world can do something, there should be no reason why i, or anyone for that matter, couldnt do it as well. I decided i wanted to learn to play the guitar, so i started teaching myself in january of my freshman year of college and improved very quickly, playing complicated fingerpicking songs before leaving for the summer break.

I think i started to get hung up at this point in the way we were brought up, and how if we had parents who had showed just a bit more interest in what we were interested in, we could have done really well. we werent discouraged from doing the things we liked, but there wasnt much interest.

anyway, theres a lot more i could write, buuuuut, camille expressed that she felt the same way i did. She said that she and doug were looking at a little slip of paper i had written little piano notes on. it wasnt sheet music, because i dont know how to read sheet music, it was just little notes that i made up so that i could remember some chords on the piano for a song, and doug asked what it was, and camille could tell they were my notes. doug looked at the paper and said"what a waste" his son goes to berkly for music and was given all sorts of resources to pursue his interest in music as a kid. he got lessons and at one point even had 2 guitar teachers. he is very good at guitar now, but he isnt such a great student. doug was feeling bad that i had all these intense interests in the arts that were never really recognized to their fullest potential.

so later that night, im assuming camille had said to doug what i was talking about in the car, about my parents, doug expressed a great interest in finding a room in the house i could use as a studio for painting and drawing and sculpture, should i get my hands on some clay. i told him that i really didnt need that much room and that the attic would be fine. the only thing is the attic is pretty cold. its a great big room that isnt heated or insulated so i gets to about 30 something or 40 degrees in the winter. i still told him it would be fine, but he suggested that we rearrange one of the rooms in the house so that i can set up a studio room for myself, saying that at some point we can construct an easle. later he was getting slightly worked up about the different business ventures i could take using my art as a means of financial income. it felt nice to see that he was taking an interest.

so basically all of this was just to say that doug showed me some cardboard in the attic that i could use for a canvas. well i didnt think it was going to be big enough for what i wanted, but i still just felt compelled to draw something on cardboard, so i bundled up and slowly started moving my other paintings up there, then my painting bag, then i brought my computer up there and cut the box open and decided that it would work out. i wish i had a camera here so i could upload some pictures of the attic and the drawing i did. i drew a woman laying on the floor, it shows her naked from behind, curled up in a ball sort of, and it shows her bottom half, with her feet sticking out a bit. i get kind of upset when i do this stuff, because i really enjoy drawing and working on it, and when i finish i dont really feel like being done. but what really gets me is this is just the priliminary sketch for what will become a painting. i often paint over fairly well rendered drawings that i would like to keep as drawings, but thats just not what its meant to be.

So anyway, i worked on the drawing and it took me longer than usual, it typically only takes about 20 minutes to 30 minutes to do the initial sketch, but this one might have taken about an hour. i was kind of having a blast up in the attic. i was really cold but i liked working up there a lot, i had my music playing off my computer and used a single light bulb to do my work by.

good grief i write too much on this thing. that is when i do decide to write. but yeah, anyway i ended up repairing a few keys on the piano here with dougs help, actually it was mainly doug who did it, since he had a piano repair kit and took a course on piano maintenance and repairing and knows all about it, but i still helped. then i shaved for my interview tomorrow. to be honest i actually think id like to try working in an office for once in my life. i usually do manual labor, but im not really all that fond of construction work, a lot of the time people have their egos and try and show you the right way to do a job when it just slows you down. i dont know, not saying that office work doesnt have its faults, but really i wouldnt know. its just something id like to try. well ima go to the interview tomorrow and find out what the pay would start out as, hear that its under ten bucks an hour, and tell them thanks for the opportunity but im going to have to accept another job. but who knows.