Art School

So that trip home to Melbourne certainly got the best of me. I helped my mother pack away a lifetime of memories into U-Haul boxes, and listened to her lament my brother's apathy, my father's infidelity, and my sister's indifference. My best friend, Evan, is doing exactly the same things he did when I left six years ago. In all actuality, everybody is doing exactly the same things they did when I left six years ago.

I think life is about fluidity. Life is dynamic. Dynamic and fluid. Or, that's the way it's supposed to be. I imagine that's the way it was, back when a person's community was limited to his tribe, and the world was dark and foreboding, and survival depended on migration. What an exciting world that must have been.

Then, Civilization planted the feet of our ancestors into the soil, all lined up in rows, forced to grow together in human orchards. For thousands of years our minds have been preened and molded and taught to grow rigid and only as strong as our neighbors. And therein lies the source of unhappiness. We were never intended to be molded into rigid things.

I realize that college is a big part of that process, a way to mass produce workers. Our purpose is to keep things going, to maintain conventions, to build bombs and restaurants and factories and computers and such. That is the mark of progress, as it has been for centuries. Millennia, maybe. There's nothing wrong with civilization, save the fact that it makes people unhappy on the best of days, and on the worst of days it makes people kill each other en masse.

I was thinking about the source of the university system. It all goes back to the original concept of a university. A place where learned men of leisure came together to think up ways to make life better. Or to think about life itself. Universities were small and exclusive and the point was not to go out and get a high-paying job. Usually because the students and faculty were wealthy and could enjoy the luxury of dreaming of a better world, or pursue questions about our current world as it relates to the human condition.

Then the Americans invented a way for everybody to go to college. Most of those new students pursued college without an interest in the pursuit of knowledge or answering questions or philosophizing or anything, but to be fed back into the work force. Why work in a factory when you can run a factory? Or build one? Or ten?

I guess I'm not sure what the value of this college experience is, anymore. I'm not passionate about engineering or business (my two previous majors). I am, however, interested in art. That's what I've been interested in for some time.

And, for some time, I decided it would be a hobby. Maybe I would bring life to my dreams through drawing and painting. It's always been therapeutic, of course. Why should it be anything more than that?

I guess I'm realizing that I'm biding my time each day until I can express myself creatively. I work at a coffee shop, then I go to school, then I come home and blow off my homework to draw or write or think. I do that for a semester, then write home for money to enroll in more mind-numbing classes and do it again. All so that I can get a job when I graduate, pay off loans, buy a car, get a house, a wife. Work to pay for things I don't need in the first place. Debt-in-perpetuity.

So I changed majors; I'd been accepted to the studio art program at my school at the start of the summer. I waited till the last minute to accept. In fact, I'd enrolled in business classes and declared that my major at the demand of my father. It worked well for him. He's just accepted a VP position, is changing jobs. Must be a very exciting time in his life.

I'm glad I went with art. He says I won't be able to feed myself. I'm not sure he'll keep fronting the money for class.

No matter. I'm in school to learn. And I live in the richest, freest country in the world. Why shouldn't I pursue my passions?

He says that's because graffiti isn't art. He hasn't heard of Basquiat.

-S