Diversifying Your Set of Skills
2.23.18
I don’t know if the fort will ever come down at this point, it’s getting cozier by the day. Aside from that, I’ve been running around the past couple days, attending interviews, sending out resumes and trying to stay disciplined to a minimum amount of words per day.
My newly found ambition all stemmed from a conversation I had with Heather the first day I
decided to start this glorified journal.
For the past few months, I have been chasing full-time jobs like a drug addict chasing a high and each time I have gotten excited, thinking, “I’m going to get this one,” the job is pulled a little further, just out of reach. Heather has helped me see that this focus on one full-time job is too singular and because of that, the other things I devote my time to, i.e. writing, local politics, seem even more laborious. Rather than focusing on getting part-time work in all three fields I care about, I’ve been putting all my eggs in one basket, dividing my mind into a competition of my interests rather than developing each of them individually.
Diversifying your career path is a skill that comes easy to Heather as she has been doing it since she was a teenager. For her, it made a lot of sense to develop photography alongside her equestrian training because she couldn’t see herself risking her body day-in- and-day-out for an entire career. Thus, she came across photography, which is now the main source of income—but she kindly reminds me that it wasn’t always this way
At the beginning of Heather’s photography career, she was willing to work for free or for peanuts and accepted jobs that others in the industry did not want to take. It was difficult because she still needed to make a living wage, but she was willing to do what she had to do to in order to gain experience. Jim Carrey has a quote something along the lines of, “you can fail at something you don’t like, so why not try and fail at something you do like?” It would’ve been easier for Heather to stay as an equestrian, but she thought about her life 20 years from then and had deduced that while it may’ve been easier in the short term, it would’ve been crippling in the long run to rely on one source of income. Ironically, failure for Heather meant limiting herself to one full-time position.
Now as I chase several jobs in each of my respective fields I feel more whole, engaging in conversations that cover an array of my interests rather than constraining myself to one. As I commit further to the development of my writing, political, and hospitality careers I also envision it all under one unifying umbrella in the future that Heather had the foresight to see at a much younger age. Framing my future in the context of an attaining elusive single goal has been a paralyzing approach of mine for years, but thanks to Heather, I may just be breaking free. Instead of looking at what I need, I’ve begun to look at how I can develop my interests in the diversification of my time, personality, and ideally, the stability of my financial future.
Time is Empty
2.23.18 - 5004 Cody ~ 7:25 PM MT
Sitting down to write twice in one day, wow! Maybe Pressfield is making an impression on me. As I joke, it’s kind of true. His distinction of a professional and an amateur is incisively honest and accurate. As an amateur writer, I dedicate small portions of my day (sometimes no time of the day!) to doing something I say I want to do for a living. Pressfield also defends us writers as he says the most difficult thing to do is to just sit down and write.
He explains that the amateur: takes things personally; expects epochs the size of Homer’s Odyssey to drop into their mind and ooze out of your fingertips in some perfect, opportune arrival of immense inspiration; and clings too much to the judgment of his/her work. The professional for Pressfield: learns to separate themselves from their work, creating a thick skin, seating their criticisms in a space separate from their ego; has a regimen where they sit down everyday, rain or shine, inspiration or no inspiration and writes. This is so that when a moment of real inspiration hits, the writer has been at it, honing their technique, to now where they can lay it down as it comes. The amateur waits on inspiration to strike, the professional writes through it.
It is very hard for me to keep at it, given my history of complacency and litany of instantaneous gratification and distraction that lay around every corner. It is nearly impossible for me to stay focused when I have a phone that flickers every two seconds and a computer that grants me access to any piece of entertainment I can think of (all for free to boot). Living in the 21st century enables most of us in the western world to live at a level of luxury never before seen my humans—we can essentially get anything delivered to our doorstep with the click of a button. We live like kings!
Yet we feel like serfs. We feel like nothing is truly satisfying and we bury our discomfort deeper into the meaningless abyss of consumption. We turn our attention to products and entertainment rather than inwards because the passive approach is easier. In a country that is run by convenience there is nothing convenient about engaging with the unhappiness that lurks in your mind while you wait in the drive-thru line at McDonalds or skip the intro to continue your binge session on Netflix. When the inconvenience of the complexity of our minds comes to the forefront we find a way to conveniently drown it out. There is no time for self-reflection in a time of instantaneous satisfaction. We feel like serfs even though we have the world at our fingertips.
Even now I have an itch to go out, an itch to watch porn, an itch to throw a movie on and cook popcorn. Pressfield would call these urges ‘resistance,’ and I suppose that it is. The progress of technology has subverted our attention spans, decreasing the value of a moment down to a swipe of the screen. Time itself changes meaning over time; when I was a kid the phrase was “time is money,” and perhaps that’s still true, but I would now say, “time is empty.”
Time has been reduced to the passing of it—I still don’t get how people can be bored. When I say that time is empty I mean that we’d rather fill it up with the consumption of meaningless information than sit and watch the seconds pass like we’re back in grade school watching the clock, waiting for the bell to ring. **UPDATE** just got back from watching meaningless videos for like an hour. Time travel is possible everyone, and I’m not talking getting black out drunk, I’m talking turning your mind off to passively spend time.
Apollo Fields Wedding Photographers
3.12.18 - Bean Fosters – Golden, CO ~ 11:06 AM MT
It’s weird how a letter on a typewriter feels more real than a note typed into a word processor. Something about the tangible ink slapped onto the page one neat character at a time that delivers finality to your words. Typing on a typewriter forces you to arrange your thoughts in real time, creating a sense of emergency that nudges your mind to move forward rather than laterally.
Once you organize the first few words of a sentence and you like them enough you put them down and you figure the rest out as you go. Before you know it your fingers are splashing all over the keyboard and little tiny metallic pangs are echoing throughout the room until a delicate chime rings to delay the creative symphony for a few seconds.
There is definitely something more present about typing on a typewriter. On a computer with WiFi your mind is being torn to the sides, “come hang out in the periphery of the Internet where you won’t have to work so hard,” it calls to us. But being lucid enough to arrange your thoughts with a focus where you can’t believe your fingers are actually moving with purposeful conviction feels like a submission to the magical creative element that eludes the amateur artist. It’s funny that returning to a more primitive, real technology can trigger the magic that lives inside of us.
As I type this in Word Processor, I am constantly fumbling my thoughts, going back into my sentences and reworking them, never allowing my mind to uninhibitedly flow forward. Real time editing grants me the godlike power to alter the creative process and assure that I don’t make any silly or clunky mistakes. The problem with that is that it interferes with the free flowing creativity that is necessary to any worthy piece of work. It would seem unnatural to see a painter go back over their work and erase a stroke of the brush. When a painter dips their brush into a palate and splash it onto a canvas they mean it; when I write on a typewriter, plucking at the keys, I mean it.
A real element is lost in the creative process when it lives in the electrons of a screen, separating our hands from our creation. It is a similar transition in social media where we immerse ourselves in a world of appearances, a world that feels real, but isn’t. It gives us this sense of partial familiarity because the importance of the real is lost in the robotic 1’s and 0’s of binary code.
There’s nothing wrong with waiting for creativity to circle back around, sitting in discomfort as it orbits your mental grasp, just like there’s nothing wrong with admitting to something painful that’s happened in your life on social media. But the electronic cursor that prods your mind, blinking in your face like a cruel mockery of your stagnant creativity is akin to the way that the world of positive appearances mocks your negative experiences. A refusal to accept the real thrusts your existence into a world of appearances that seeks only to satisfy surface level gratification, ignoring the deeper concepts of our lives that wind up plaguing our minds into a cycle of consumptive passivity.
Allow pain to enter your mind and let seeds of creativity take on some water before you abandon their growth. Simpler times seem nostalgic because our minds were more engaged, more responsible when we didn’t have crutches to carry us along in our lives. It’s hard to argue for the welcoming of pain into one’s life, so think of it as an invitation to the real; a return to experience rather than appearance, because experience is where we derive meaning from and in the end we all want to lead meaningful lives. Don’t let the electrons mock you into a passive life. Move forward, not laterally.
It is Human to Feel
2.23.18 - Bookbar ~ 3:21 PM
Lately I’ve been having a conversation with myself about my own potential. Perhaps its listening to Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, perhaps its serendipitous timing given my current “occupational struggles.” Why don’t I just say “I can’t get a fucking job,” rather than dress it up like some piece of watered down reality? I guess using phrases like these is a way for our brains to navigate the pain we feel when we have to accept a harsh truth of our reality.
My current reality is that I am afraid of my own potential. I’m afraid of putting myself out there, of putting a price tag on my work. By remaining judgment free of others, I have carved out a place for myself to be safe from judgment as well, because I guess I’d rather live in comfortable anonymity than recognized splendor—or worse—recognized failure. I’ve rationalized to myself for years that the reason I haven’t committed to a certain work is that I have always found a reason not to do it, a caveat that renders the effort futile. But I’m just coming to grips with the fact that if I want to be a successful writer I need to:
a) write (duh) and;
b) Not be afraid to approach my own potential.
Even as I sit at Bookbar on Tennyson, surrounded by the clinks and clanks of glassware, I question my happiness with getting the job at Oasis Brewery. It's another job that doesn’t push my limits, it's an atmosphere where I'm already comfortable-- it's safe. By my failure to dedicate myself to my work, my tendency to take what's safe, and my contentedness with what I have: I have paved myself a history of mediocrity. Growing pains are part of the deal when you enter a new industry or part of your life and I have spent my entire adulthood avoiding difficulty. The only time I really reached for something was bartending at Henry’s Restaurant in NYC and I achieved it and quickly became complacent. Even there, I wasn’t really pushing myself to master a craft.
The only thing I’ve exercised a great deal of self-control and awareness is in understanding social interactions. As a friendly face, I have honed the ability to make people feel comfortable and welcome to say that which makes them vulnerable. I’ve done this with a combination of eye contact and knowledge that we’re all insecure and unsure of ourselves, and I’m just willing to be the first one to admit it in a group. When someone is overly sure of themselves it strikes me as arrogant, and I’d rather be vulnerable than overconfident. That’s why I’m excited to open Apollo Fields with Heather. I know I have the ability to make all of our guests comfortable and I know Heather will execute the production side of things or die trying. I am so lucky to have found a partner so rational and understanding.
Back to the conversation on my potential -- I have learned that my biggest asset in writing is my power of description. That I can transport the reader to a place of my creation and I can have fun doing it.
All around me BookBar is buzzing with the comfortable speed of a café on a Saturday afternoon. The patrons around me pluck away at their computers, while people seated on leather couches laugh in the background. Money is exchanged over the counter and “have-a-nice-days” are cheerily spoke through the barista's lips. There’s a comfort to cafés that I wish could plop in my living room, where people talk and jest in casual business. I didn’t think about it, but you rarely find tie-wearing businessmen conducting conversations in cafés, probably because they mean business and its too important to be said over a coffee table. Keep an eye out for them - they tend to seem out of place.
But here I sit, happily plucking away, a letter at a time from my worried consciousness, conjuring up sentences from seemingly nowhere. They say that energy is neither created nor destroyed but where does creative energy come from? Logic says that if it isn’t created, then it must live dormant in each of us until we call it forth to our mouths or fingertips. A reassuring thought except for the creative individual during writer’s block-- “I have it in me somewhere, it has to be here!” like they're looking for a pair of lost keys stuck between couch cushions. What am I writing anyway? Or more accurately, why?
I like to investigate the human condition, getting at why we behave the way we do in social settings and how we can better understand one another. I like (not always) to be honest with myself, engaging in these wacky conversations because running away from them makes me feel like shit. It makes me feel like the way I used to when I would lie to avoid my harsh truths of reality. The way of life that really came to a head in my first semester at SUNY Cortland where I avoided my problems altogether. Everyday I woke in dread of the problems I’ve swept under the carpet the night before; and every night I went to sleep in a cannabis-induced shame. It takes courage to have these conversations but the alternative is a tepid reality laced with indifference, envy, and personal stagnation.
It is human to feel—to ignore this is to ignore human life itself.