I may not be many things but one thing I know I am and always will be is
NOT LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!
I didn't follow the traditional path to college right out of high school. Frankly, I was sick and tired of reading assignments and writing a report on this, that and th' other thing...and I was quite sure that going to college meant at least four more years of doing just that!
Enough! I just wanted a break!
If I'd been smarter, I couldawouldashoulda, like many of my peers, taken off to see the world. Or at least to Europe with a rail pass and a list of hostels in my backpack.
Instead, I took two jobs and worked hard, setting my sights on the other coast. Eventually, I packed my car and travelled west to find my utopia. I did (Oregon) and the rest is, as they say, herstory.
But my life and work has never been "traditional" which I credit or blame on being an artist.
Some may say to be talented and gifted is a great blessing. Very true, but it also brings with it hard-to-define intangibles and harder to live with, financial in$ecurity.
I often wonder if I hadn't been born an artist, what kind of work would I do? It's not that I didn't want to go to college, I wanted to go on to art school which my very pragmatic parents wouldn't help me do. They wanted me to go to our local community college to get a liberal arts degree.
Huh? At the time, I didn't even know what that meant? Besides I had better things to do, like move out west!
I created the kind of life I'd hoped for with one tiny (read: HUGE) exception: financial security...but that comes with the territory...of being an artist living in Oregon.
Maybe a liberal arts degree would've been handy, after all.
