Unemployed Again, Naturally

Today I woke up at 10am and for a while I just lay in bed and stared at the hair on my knee and then I got up and sent job application emails and looked at Facebook and then I went and had lunch with Andy and Andre at the Pyramid brewery, where none of us drank any beer. We talked about our positions in society as the supper-bell-ringers, signaling the world that it was "Time to consume!" and thus, of course, causing the downfall of civilization. I had chicken chili though, which is better than beef chili and so it all balances out.

Not having a freelance job to currently attend to means that I am free to do all sorts of fun/meaningless things. After lunch I went to the bookstore and bought a book about user interface design for my web design class and then came home and learned how to play the world's slowest online scrabble game.

I should be really excited about all this free time, but I think work brings me meaning. Work equals producing, and at its best, producing in my job means creating, and I somehow value creating above all else as the meaning and purpose of life.

All I am creating right now is a lot of emails in my friends' mailboxes and a lot of scribble on their walls and nonsense on their voicemails.

I really must stop whining and get off my butt and do something. Creativity doesn't need employment to be employed. I have a million ideas and now is the time to implement. But first, more whining...

~~~
When people talk about milestones growing up they never mention the fact that the first time you get really truly all out bed-ridden green-snotted low-grade-feverishly sick without access to your family or readily available healthcare, you will certainly panic and think you are going to die.

I'm sure they mostly don't mention it because afterwards it seems silly, but I'm sure if everyone thinks back to the worst and first time they were sick and out on their own, they will recall that they were a little freaked out.

Last week Andy was stuck on a presentation meeting and worked all weekend, and I had no one to call because as I've already mentioned I have no friends here, and since my COBRA health insurance is Aetna of California, I could only really count on coverage if I went to the emergency room. And my paycheck hadn't come yet, and I had a fever and blood in my snot and cramps from my period. And it was 11pm and there was no Tylenol in the house and I didn't know what to do.

I called my mom in tears and told her I had a fever and that I was scared of getting brain damage. I'm sure she must have wondered how she raised her daughter to be 27 years old and worried about brain damage, but luckily I have a wonderful mother so she was only supportive and loving and offered to send money or fly me home.

Hearing my mother's voice seemed to calm me down somewhat, and Andy came home for a break to bring me hugs and Tylenol, good sweet boy that he is. Five days later I woke up one morning and felt all better. The end!

~~~
I have been reading up on typography because I find that typography is the easy way out for some people when they are assessing your design portfolio. Like when someone is giving an ad critique in class and they say "But that ad could be for any product, it's not differentiated enough." Sometimes that's true, and sometimes they are just blowing bloody green snot out their nose, but if you don't know enough to know when they're wrong, you'll fall prey to their all-purpose nitpicking.

Same thing goes for typography. Typography is such a complex art form that involves so many practices and so much fine-tuning, that to look at a portfolio and say "your typography could be better" is like reading a book and saying "your grammar could be stronger." More importantly, it drives at a general skill level and not at a specific piece or issue.

So studying type seems like the best way to call their bluff, and I've been reading typography books until the wee hours, and having typography dreams as a result. The other morning I woke up with what I was sure was the best new idea for a video game ever based on the Gutenberg Bible where the point would be to decide a character's path by deciphering between printed pages and identifying key glyphs and character-space to determine which ones were fake. Each fake page would take you to a dangerous world full of intricate type-puzzles and each real page would transport you to a reward level.

I thought it all brilliant and was ready to start making up keyframes or something when I realized that this was basically the idea behind the computer game Myst, and then I went back to sleep.