I think it's no secret that I'm a closet comic book geek. I've grown up knowing more about the random backstories of myriad supervillians and the hierarchies of heroes in spandex than I care to say. I get goosebumps watching the Avengers. Not so deep down, I'm still a ten-year-old oggling his Saturday morning cartoons. B. loves on LOTR from time to time, but her knowledge pales in comparison to the extensive Silmarillion research I know certain members of my extended family have done.
We all have our obsessions growing up, some of them stick with us, other fall by the wayside. I was an avid videogamer until one spring turned my fancy to love... or at least cute girls. We often outgrow our childhood fantasies and pastimes. But sometimes holding on to the heroes of your youth can be the best thing for you.
I have one question for you folks:
Who is IG-88?
No peeking, no cheating, no googling. Do you know who he is?
Didn't think so.
Well, I did, I'm ashamed to say. And it landed me my first paid gig as an illustrator.
IG-88 is a particularly cylindrical fellow in the lineup of bounty hunters employed by Darth Vader to track down Han Solo and thereby lead the Empire straight to young Luke Skywalker.
That's right people, we're gonna talk Star Wars for a sec.
I have many fond memories of watching Star Wars as a kid. Often it served as background ambience to set the mood for my vast Lego mythologies spread across the basement carpet. Many a summer afternoon was spent in the cool shelter of the dark, theater-like basement. We owned the entire Star Wars trilogy on vhs back when it was still in its unadulterated form - no frivolous CGI plugins and extra characters so George Lucas could beat his chest and tastelessly flash his obvious zillions to the innocent public. Sorry, tangential rant over. I loved the characters, I knew the plots, I knew all the important lines and I knew when it was time to put my legos down and enjoy a lightsaber battle and when it was ok to focus on my latest plastic architectural masterpiece and let Han and Leia make out in peace.
But my devotion to the franchise is dwarfed by that of my brothers'. Logan has played (and soundly beaten) nearly every video game made or designed by Lucasarts, Inc. Adam somehow obtained thorough knowledge of every character, including the superfluous military leaders in the Empire who one by one get force-choked out of command. Seriously, who remembers who Grand Moff Tarkin is?
Well, sadly I do. Because you see I not only lived with these Jedi Masters, I roomed with them, listened to them, and was slowly but surely indoctrinated by them as their unwitting and unwilling padawan. That is until the triumphant day when Adam coerced us into playing Star Wars trivial pursuit one rainy day and the apprentice truly became the master. I beat him. More than once in fact. An arbitrary victory, I know, but aren't all childhood squabbles? Even as I type this I feel a strange swelling mixture of pride and shame. Their fascination with a galaxy far far away soaked in.
And apparently some of it stayed there, because when the man who has now employed me talked about his idea about a Star Wars kids book about IG-88, my prior knowledge of the mischievous droid was what clinched the job for me. Thank you Adam. Thank you Logan. Your brainwashing has done some good after all.
Here's to all the geeks and nerds who wear their passions on their sleeves. Go ahead and love what you love, you never know when you might find a kindred spirit and make something great.
May the force be with you,
S
p.s. - I'll post pages from the book when its finished in a few months.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Tru(ancy) Dat!
Hooky.
The game I never really got to play until I went to college.
B. and I skipped class yesterday. We had (and still have) tons of homework, midterms crashing down upon us, stress and busywork and class loads burying us and our marriage, pummeling us as a couple from every angle. Our days consist of meager morsels of food snatched between classes now that cooking have just become an inefficient use of our time. I leave before she's awake. She gets home long after dark. We're struggling to cope.
But not yesterday. Yesterday we just said screw it and left town.
We didn't go far. Just an hour's drive north to see B.'s sister and her family visiting. Their grandpa, an aunt and a few cousins joined us all for dinner. One cousin got some well-earned and well-meant ribbing about his recent truancy issues. We could only shake our heads. He'll graduate high school, go to college, and maybe one day he too will skip class like us, just to preserve some semblance of sanity.
We were asked about how our lives were going, why we didn't visit more often. All we could tell them was that we had to skip class just to come that night. I'm not complaining here. We're both employed, we both go to good schools, our credit cards and student loans are manageable, we are in relatively good health. I should be grateful and I am. I guess my question is:
When do we get our lives back?
When will I go through a week and not worry about paying all the bills?
When will the universe let us start saving again?
When will we get a weekend together, homework-free?
I know this is the "career" chapter of our lives (it has to be, neither of us has time for each other, let alone a kid), but come on, people. There has to be some light at the end of this tunnel. There's got to be a job at the end of these long years of classes and training and portfolio-building. Because that job has to pay for B.'s tunnel-end light: grad school. Make that ONLY grad school. No more juggling full-time work and 12-15 credits a semester. No more insulting busywork, no more sadist chemistry professors who take pleasure in squashing the souls of students. No more getting caught in the crossfire of med school hopefuls and the premed classes that are only used as deterrents.
Okay, ranting done. But seriously, she's going into zoology, ok? Not med school. Leave my wife alone and lets move on through stupid chem and be done with it.
Back to truancy. I don't like that our life has become a choice of what to miss out on. I either miss out on the early years of my marriage, career-building job opportunities, important learning moments in school, deep and important spiritual and personal growth at church, or time with family.
We're all truant on something.
I missed out on most of the dinner conversation last night, but I'm not too upset. I'm used to snatching opportunistic mouthfuls whenever I get the chance. Plus the reason for my absence from the dinner table came in the form of my adorable 2 year old niece. I took her out when she got antsy (about 3-4 times in the same meal) and we found things to marvel at in the parking lot next to a mall. We picked flowers and put them in her hair, we picked more for her mom and for her great aunt. We looked for red cars among the crowd of parked vehicles, we spun on the grass until we plopped down and stared up at the clouds. I needed that. Probably more than she did.
We've missed her, but we've also been missing out on her. We try to be a stable presence in the lives of our nieces and nephew, but with them living so far away and our attention so often and thoroughly diverted elsewhere it's hard to keep up with them and how fast their childhood is slipping away.
Yesterday was good. Yesterday was needed. It was a reminder to stop for a moment, let some people down, abandon some posts, be truant for a moment, and breathe.
Nothing's changed on the homework front. We're still buried. We're still behind. We still jump straight from work to homework like miserable amphibians. But I was reminded yesterday that I'm not just a paycheck. I'm not just a taxpayer, a bill payer, an employee, a student, a grade, a number.
I'm the uncle who found the purple flower to put in my niece's hair.
Maybe my cousin's ahead of the curve. Sometimes school can wait. Because life sure won't.
What are you missing out on?
S
The game I never really got to play until I went to college.
B. and I skipped class yesterday. We had (and still have) tons of homework, midterms crashing down upon us, stress and busywork and class loads burying us and our marriage, pummeling us as a couple from every angle. Our days consist of meager morsels of food snatched between classes now that cooking have just become an inefficient use of our time. I leave before she's awake. She gets home long after dark. We're struggling to cope.
But not yesterday. Yesterday we just said screw it and left town.
We didn't go far. Just an hour's drive north to see B.'s sister and her family visiting. Their grandpa, an aunt and a few cousins joined us all for dinner. One cousin got some well-earned and well-meant ribbing about his recent truancy issues. We could only shake our heads. He'll graduate high school, go to college, and maybe one day he too will skip class like us, just to preserve some semblance of sanity.
We were asked about how our lives were going, why we didn't visit more often. All we could tell them was that we had to skip class just to come that night. I'm not complaining here. We're both employed, we both go to good schools, our credit cards and student loans are manageable, we are in relatively good health. I should be grateful and I am. I guess my question is:
When do we get our lives back?
When will I go through a week and not worry about paying all the bills?
When will the universe let us start saving again?
When will we get a weekend together, homework-free?
I know this is the "career" chapter of our lives (it has to be, neither of us has time for each other, let alone a kid), but come on, people. There has to be some light at the end of this tunnel. There's got to be a job at the end of these long years of classes and training and portfolio-building. Because that job has to pay for B.'s tunnel-end light: grad school. Make that ONLY grad school. No more juggling full-time work and 12-15 credits a semester. No more insulting busywork, no more sadist chemistry professors who take pleasure in squashing the souls of students. No more getting caught in the crossfire of med school hopefuls and the premed classes that are only used as deterrents.
Okay, ranting done. But seriously, she's going into zoology, ok? Not med school. Leave my wife alone and lets move on through stupid chem and be done with it.
Back to truancy. I don't like that our life has become a choice of what to miss out on. I either miss out on the early years of my marriage, career-building job opportunities, important learning moments in school, deep and important spiritual and personal growth at church, or time with family.
We're all truant on something.
I missed out on most of the dinner conversation last night, but I'm not too upset. I'm used to snatching opportunistic mouthfuls whenever I get the chance. Plus the reason for my absence from the dinner table came in the form of my adorable 2 year old niece. I took her out when she got antsy (about 3-4 times in the same meal) and we found things to marvel at in the parking lot next to a mall. We picked flowers and put them in her hair, we picked more for her mom and for her great aunt. We looked for red cars among the crowd of parked vehicles, we spun on the grass until we plopped down and stared up at the clouds. I needed that. Probably more than she did.
We've missed her, but we've also been missing out on her. We try to be a stable presence in the lives of our nieces and nephew, but with them living so far away and our attention so often and thoroughly diverted elsewhere it's hard to keep up with them and how fast their childhood is slipping away.
Yesterday was good. Yesterday was needed. It was a reminder to stop for a moment, let some people down, abandon some posts, be truant for a moment, and breathe.
Nothing's changed on the homework front. We're still buried. We're still behind. We still jump straight from work to homework like miserable amphibians. But I was reminded yesterday that I'm not just a paycheck. I'm not just a taxpayer, a bill payer, an employee, a student, a grade, a number.
I'm the uncle who found the purple flower to put in my niece's hair.
Maybe my cousin's ahead of the curve. Sometimes school can wait. Because life sure won't.
What are you missing out on?
S
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
The Kid in You.
I got a new job a few weeks ago.
Correction, I got another job a few weeks ago.
I was lucky enough to keep my old job for security as this new position tries me on. I split my hours between my old job and this new job doing graphic design for a life science museum.
I get to spend a lot of time in the hidden parts of a museum, the off-the-map here there be monsters void that dazzles any child's imagination. What goes on at a school at night? What happens in the museum after hours? What on earth goes on in a teachers' lounge?
The place has been closed for months for renovations (a whole building got added last year) and now that the opening is impending, they're hiring to get ready. So, in addition to helping design exciting works of art like pamphlets and visitors guides - wheeee! - I spend a lot of time in the basement surrounded by creepy taxidermy. Shelves of shriveled shrews and cataloged cobras. Gigantic jars of jellyfish, flasks of fish, squishy squids in slimy solutions. Drawers of desiccated dung beetles. Such is all I have for company for 10 hours a week until we get to move into the new offices. An uncharted, unknown underground railroad of the animal kingdom preserved for zoological study. This is what the museum doesn't display.
My wife would love it.
Like a kid on Christmas morning.
B. and I decided a long time ago that it was best we met when and where we did. Had we met any later, we wouldn't have started dating. Any earlier, we wouldn't have been ready for each other.
In short, she beat up kids like me in high school.
I often wonder what it would be like to meet her as a high schooler ,as a thirteen-year-old, as a third-grader. Where is the kid in her?
It's there, in the basement of the museum.
As a kid, she asked Santa for a microscope. She treasured her Harry Potter along with the rest of us, but she also cherished her Encyclopedia of Mammals.
As a kid, my wife was a nerd.
She still is today, and it's so hot.
There are still aspects of my own childhood that survived the gauntlet of adolescence. I still have juvenile tendencies that annoy her, perplex her and even at times endear myself to her. I major in doodling. I have websites of cartooning. I study concept art for motion pictures and video games.
To the untrained eye, one would think I never grew up. Where's the kid in me?
He's hunched over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, eyes glued to Saturday morning cartoons.
If/when we have our own kid, I have a feeling our inner kids will come out to play a lot more. I'll sit and watch looney tunes with my kiddo while B. sleeps in. She'll subtly slip in science-y educational birthday presents into the mix over the years. We'll take our kid to museums, both art and science. Three kids wondering at the world on the greatest field trips ever.
I still see the kid in her. As she tells me excitedly about the just plain coolness of nature, I catch glimpses of that elementary school nerd saving up for a lab coat to go with her microscope. She sees the kid in me anytime we go see an action movie/cartoon/anything that should be too juvenile for a taxpaying adult. We let each other geek out, and each time we do, it helps us travel back in time to our days as singular souls searching for each other.
Where's the kid in you?
What is he like?
S
Correction, I got another job a few weeks ago.
I was lucky enough to keep my old job for security as this new position tries me on. I split my hours between my old job and this new job doing graphic design for a life science museum.
I get to spend a lot of time in the hidden parts of a museum, the off-the-map here there be monsters void that dazzles any child's imagination. What goes on at a school at night? What happens in the museum after hours? What on earth goes on in a teachers' lounge?
The place has been closed for months for renovations (a whole building got added last year) and now that the opening is impending, they're hiring to get ready. So, in addition to helping design exciting works of art like pamphlets and visitors guides - wheeee! - I spend a lot of time in the basement surrounded by creepy taxidermy. Shelves of shriveled shrews and cataloged cobras. Gigantic jars of jellyfish, flasks of fish, squishy squids in slimy solutions. Drawers of desiccated dung beetles. Such is all I have for company for 10 hours a week until we get to move into the new offices. An uncharted, unknown underground railroad of the animal kingdom preserved for zoological study. This is what the museum doesn't display.
My wife would love it.
Like a kid on Christmas morning.
B. and I decided a long time ago that it was best we met when and where we did. Had we met any later, we wouldn't have started dating. Any earlier, we wouldn't have been ready for each other.
In short, she beat up kids like me in high school.
I often wonder what it would be like to meet her as a high schooler ,as a thirteen-year-old, as a third-grader. Where is the kid in her?
It's there, in the basement of the museum.
As a kid, she asked Santa for a microscope. She treasured her Harry Potter along with the rest of us, but she also cherished her Encyclopedia of Mammals.
As a kid, my wife was a nerd.
She still is today, and it's so hot.
There are still aspects of my own childhood that survived the gauntlet of adolescence. I still have juvenile tendencies that annoy her, perplex her and even at times endear myself to her. I major in doodling. I have websites of cartooning. I study concept art for motion pictures and video games.
To the untrained eye, one would think I never grew up. Where's the kid in me?
He's hunched over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, eyes glued to Saturday morning cartoons.
If/when we have our own kid, I have a feeling our inner kids will come out to play a lot more. I'll sit and watch looney tunes with my kiddo while B. sleeps in. She'll subtly slip in science-y educational birthday presents into the mix over the years. We'll take our kid to museums, both art and science. Three kids wondering at the world on the greatest field trips ever.
I still see the kid in her. As she tells me excitedly about the just plain coolness of nature, I catch glimpses of that elementary school nerd saving up for a lab coat to go with her microscope. She sees the kid in me anytime we go see an action movie/cartoon/anything that should be too juvenile for a taxpaying adult. We let each other geek out, and each time we do, it helps us travel back in time to our days as singular souls searching for each other.
Where's the kid in you?
What is he like?
S
Thursday, October 3, 2013
While the Getting's Good.
A few weeks ago I attended B.'s history class with her. I needed the car later that day or some other logistical requirement brought me there, and I actually had a really great time. She's taking a History of WWII class and loving it. She's intrigued by one of the world's most famous and infamous conflicts. As am I. It helps that we were discussing the Soviet Union that day and her professor (who got a masters in Russian economics) is actually married to a Russian. She incorporates stories she got from her in-laws about the terrors of that time into her lectures. She's a great teacher. It's a great class.
I really miss using that more academic side of my brain. With all of my general credits out of the way, I'm left with a lot of pure studio classes. I've traded in my textbooks for tutorial videos on graphics software, my research papers for paintbrushes. I study in sketchbooks now. But I do miss that more traditional atmosphere of academia (although not so much the research papers).
B. and I are in very different academic spheres nowadays. It's nice to have some occasional common ground intellectually. She loves science. I can appreciate the complexities of nature. I love making stories and images appealing to readers and viewers. She can appreciate craftsmanship. But we both love history. On that playing field we can meet as peers with equal knowledge and interest.
I really treasure that shared sanctuary of erudition these days. After long days where I leave at 7 am only to come home after class ends at 10 at night, it's hard not to feel like strangers to each other during the week. There's already a scheduling chasm between us, I don't need a gap between us intellectually.
I've noticed that when I try to tell her about a visiting illustrator who lectured about freelancing for the New Yorker or about this one concept artist who developed the character design for such-and-such in some Dreamworks studio films, her eyes will get glossy, she'll nod appreciatively, let me deflate and just wait until she can turn the conversation back to something more interesting to her. Sometimes she'll even just start on her own tangent before I've finished my (probably unnecessarily loquacious) account.
Sometimes, she just doesn't get it.
Not to say she's the only one guilty of it, either. She'll look at me a little miffed as I'm rambling about this one graphic design I spotted or some composition tool I want to try in my own projects. I wonder why she's so peeved until I realize she was in the middle of a story about why jellyfish are called jellyfish and what it was like to dissect a Portuguese Manowar. (Incidentally, they're called jellyfish because what is essentially their equivalent to our circulatory system is filled not with viscous blood but with a more gelatinous substance.)
Sometimes, I just don't get it.
We can't help it. We are in very different fields of expertise. We are learning more intensely about our separate careers now more than ever and we're bound to bring some of that baggage home with us. We don't need to get it. We just need to get each other.
I know when she's truly excited about something zoological she won't be able to focus on anything I have to tell her until she spills. I also know she teaches me something new all the time. I genuinely learn from her. Most of my trivial tidbits consist of whatever imdb.com-inspired refuse has adhered to my short-term memory, so her stories are bound to be more educational, more valuable and just plain cool. (jelly blood?!! cool!)
She knows when I am really and truly pumped and inspired to do more of what I love better than I have, to really hone my skills and emulate other craftsman and image makers (I hate the word 'artist,' it carries such a stigma) there is no hope of shutting me up until I have made some preliminary sketches and dragged her through the online portfolios of someone who's name she'll undoubtedly forget within ten minutes.
I mentioned a visiting illustrator who came to campus earlier. She's actually married to another famous illustrator. They have very different styles. They have very different schedules. They have very different work. They always say they could never work together because they're too competitive. They keep things separate to keep the peace.
I could never have married an illustrator. B. could never have married a scientist. Maybe it's our competitive natures, maybe it's that we would get bored with each other if we already knew all of the stuff the other was learning. Maybe we just enjoy the differences between us.
Sometimes we just don't get it. But we've got each other.
What don't you get?
Is the getting ever good enough?
S
I really miss using that more academic side of my brain. With all of my general credits out of the way, I'm left with a lot of pure studio classes. I've traded in my textbooks for tutorial videos on graphics software, my research papers for paintbrushes. I study in sketchbooks now. But I do miss that more traditional atmosphere of academia (although not so much the research papers).
B. and I are in very different academic spheres nowadays. It's nice to have some occasional common ground intellectually. She loves science. I can appreciate the complexities of nature. I love making stories and images appealing to readers and viewers. She can appreciate craftsmanship. But we both love history. On that playing field we can meet as peers with equal knowledge and interest.
I really treasure that shared sanctuary of erudition these days. After long days where I leave at 7 am only to come home after class ends at 10 at night, it's hard not to feel like strangers to each other during the week. There's already a scheduling chasm between us, I don't need a gap between us intellectually.
I've noticed that when I try to tell her about a visiting illustrator who lectured about freelancing for the New Yorker or about this one concept artist who developed the character design for such-and-such in some Dreamworks studio films, her eyes will get glossy, she'll nod appreciatively, let me deflate and just wait until she can turn the conversation back to something more interesting to her. Sometimes she'll even just start on her own tangent before I've finished my (probably unnecessarily loquacious) account.
Sometimes, she just doesn't get it.
Not to say she's the only one guilty of it, either. She'll look at me a little miffed as I'm rambling about this one graphic design I spotted or some composition tool I want to try in my own projects. I wonder why she's so peeved until I realize she was in the middle of a story about why jellyfish are called jellyfish and what it was like to dissect a Portuguese Manowar. (Incidentally, they're called jellyfish because what is essentially their equivalent to our circulatory system is filled not with viscous blood but with a more gelatinous substance.)
Sometimes, I just don't get it.
We can't help it. We are in very different fields of expertise. We are learning more intensely about our separate careers now more than ever and we're bound to bring some of that baggage home with us. We don't need to get it. We just need to get each other.
I know when she's truly excited about something zoological she won't be able to focus on anything I have to tell her until she spills. I also know she teaches me something new all the time. I genuinely learn from her. Most of my trivial tidbits consist of whatever imdb.com-inspired refuse has adhered to my short-term memory, so her stories are bound to be more educational, more valuable and just plain cool. (jelly blood?!! cool!)
She knows when I am really and truly pumped and inspired to do more of what I love better than I have, to really hone my skills and emulate other craftsman and image makers (I hate the word 'artist,' it carries such a stigma) there is no hope of shutting me up until I have made some preliminary sketches and dragged her through the online portfolios of someone who's name she'll undoubtedly forget within ten minutes.
I mentioned a visiting illustrator who came to campus earlier. She's actually married to another famous illustrator. They have very different styles. They have very different schedules. They have very different work. They always say they could never work together because they're too competitive. They keep things separate to keep the peace.
I could never have married an illustrator. B. could never have married a scientist. Maybe it's our competitive natures, maybe it's that we would get bored with each other if we already knew all of the stuff the other was learning. Maybe we just enjoy the differences between us.
Sometimes we just don't get it. But we've got each other.
What don't you get?
Is the getting ever good enough?
S
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