Imaginative Dispostion, Creative Pleasures

Small, Medium, or Large

So…I got turned down for another job today. I’m trying to be optimistic about everything but rejection in any form hurts. The rejection wasn’t unfamiliar to me either. It pretty much was the same, right down to the wording and phrasing, of my last couple rejections. Boy, it’s all getting old very quick.

This time it was, “You're a great artist, but we’re looking for someone with a little more graphic design experience." I’ve heard this many times before…quite a few times in the last year. It always begins with, ‘Your artistry is incredible BUT…’ And ends with the basic, ‘We want someone in this or that field…sorry, not yours.’

What it comes down to is that I am a ceramics major. I chose this direction not out of longing to make money but out of a compelling desire to create. Have I chosen wrong? Now I’m faced with that evil and tiresome word…money. I have none, I need some, and I must find someone willing to exchange some form of labor for some crusty wrinkled greenbacks that will inexorably increase the design of my life.

But what can be done? It does not seem to matter how qualified I am for a position, how hard I will work, or what I can show to ascertain and prove my ability to do one heck of a job…because when it comes down to it, there will always be someone else applying for the position that has picked that right major. There are no random job openings for ceramicists so I must look elsewhere, yet, every time I apply for any other art position I get turned down because it's not my field of expertise.

. . .

Maybe I shall join my roommate, sooner rather than later, in scooping ice cream. I mean, that would be fulfilling, right? Shoveling multi-flavored creations into sugar cones and paper bowls just to watch giggly teenagers on first dates and tired mothers appeasing their young ones in exchange for those tired craggy pieces of paper with faces of dead presidents on them that will inevitably increase the subsistence of my life. It would be worth it...right.

For some reason, I just don't think so.

But lets face fact, at some point I may have to stop making decisions about glaze colors: will that be copper magnesium, gerstley borate, or nepheline syenite and think, rather, in terms of, “Yes sir, will that be a small, medium, or large?”