There is a lot that goes into moving from one house to another, even more if its in another city and more still if its in another state. Thats what we’ve done. I left a job, friends, home I owned (co-owned) and a city I had gotten to know pretty well, and now find myself a stranger in a strange land. I suppose my family does, its not just me. We all are outsiders in this place, but my wife has it a bit easier as she has a job, the reason for the move, so she has colleagues that she can at least talk with. I don’t. My attempts to find employment have’t gone well.

I should clarify, the one job I applied to, I got a phone interview and then a face to face with four managers. The phone interview I thought I did really well in so I wasn’t surprised that I moved forward. The face to face, I was tired, nervous and unfocused and bombed pretty bad. The experience is quickly becoming one of those moments when you feel awkward or embarrassed flashes into your mind, as a mnemonic precursor to the actual real time event.

I keep looking back at it and thinking how could I have done that? How could I be so amateurish? What am I even doing in this career? Thats another aspect to this, do i even want to remain a designer. Employers are looking for people with a passion for their work. I can’t say for sure if thats me. Am I passionate about things? Yes. For sure. Are they design? In some aspects yes but mostly not. When I answer the question: If you could do anything what would it be? or Whats your dream job. All my answers are art related or encompass making some form of art, and design is surely a part of those endeavors, but do I want to wake up and make  pamphlets all day? Or kern text or make endless iterations of the same thing? No, certainly not. Then again all aspects of working even in a dream job, aren’t all perfect. Theres plenty of mundane rig-a-ma-roll that goes into dream jobs too.

Another culprit in the bad interview is a healthy dose of self sabotage. Thats right, I did it all to myself on purpose. Well, maybe…subconsciously. There could be self sabotage of having to perform again, make things beautiful. Doing that sometimes makes me feel like someones yelling “Dance Monkey! Dance!” There could be over zealous Mr. Mom going on. Wanting to stay home with your kids can be a very compelling. I really enjoy spending time with my kid and I’m really in no hurry to get back to work. I’ll only have so much time with him. I’m especially conscious of it given my medical history. I’m not exactly expecting to live till I’m 80.

What should I do. Is there a solution or compromise that I can find? Just to keep applying and trying to find the right job that would allow me to balance work, dreams and fatherhood. Does it actually exist? That waits to be seen.

I’ve been working on my portfolio site and it can be found here:

http://portfolio.mythdrivinglegend.com/

This is built on a WordPress backbone and uses fancy pants theme named Locus. Its actually straight forward and simple (looking). On the back end its a bit nightmarish. Adding things to the gallery section is a chore and I haven’t got all my pieces in place yet. It is kind of nice how it handles animations, i have one in there now, its missing its thumbnail, but I like how its able to display them.

I’m not a huge fan of the Lightbox style, the styling elements on the image when it pops up. I’d also like it if one were able to just click a ‘next’ button or arrow to move from one piece to the next. The theme supports multiple image per gallery item, but not really that gallery item to item navigation as far as I can see, but its worth looking into.

Almost done with my pulp cover. Need to resolve some things and add in background, set pieces.
Tube-man looks horrible and my woman needs dynamic lighting/colors added.

I don’t usually post stuff I make at work. I thought it might be nice to though so here is a little bit from the promo for Science of Healing event.

I accidentally washed my Wacom tablet pen on Sunday. That really sucked. I have it sitting in a bag of rice, this is supposed to help pull the moisture out of the device (or other electronic devices like cell phones). It picked up briefly and I was hopeful it was working again but it seems the pressure sensitivity is gone and the eraser end in non-functional. That is not good, hopefully more time in the rice will make it better? I have a Bamboo back up, I bought it for work, so I’ll bring it home tonight and try it out.

Since the computer was out for drawing, I busted out some Bristol board and started laying out my painting, Just putting in figures and doing a simple light line inking so I can copy and work up a value scales, and get final positioning and composition correct.

I did get two more postcards done. The Evil Pickleman, Lord Gurken, Filfy Solo and the group shot are all done and could be uploaded for printing, I’ll look at that tonight.

Also, legs felt crappy the last couple days, was it too much food, beer, sugar, caffeine? I dont know, but Im looking forward to when it stops being a distraction.

Im terrible. I have a real and bizarre affectation of work habitude. I set these weird goals for myself to do X amount of work, on different stuff, random things, Camp Freedom Logos, CD covers, Websites, toys, paintings and they all seem to enjoy simmering in my brain rather than be actually expressed. Thinking of doing vs. actual doing. Is it that just sitting down and going through the motions of work artificially, somehow becomes actual work? Do people notice the difference between heartless automaton constructed work and passion fueled genius? I am starting to doubt that anyone can, or perhaps the latter is far more uncommon than I previously believed.

Also, thinking a lot about apprenticeship vs. class based instruction. Inquiry vs. passive education models. Vygotsky  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky and such. Anyone down with Vygotsky? He is the current topic of conversation around the DeFwis household.

So I had been styling this site with fair amount of ease and then it came time to put my posts into some sort of organization. Thats when things came unhinged. The theme I was using, Thematic, wasn’t going to easily allow me to make my pages into blog -like displays. You can, and I had in the past, cheated this by replacing the header navs “Pages” navigation buttons with “Categories” navigation.

Pages are more for static pages like About Us or Contact while Categories are labels applied to Posts. By linking a page to display a category of posts it creates the illusion of separate blogs. So now the Capstone Page displays all the posts in the Capstone category, as well as they are display on the Home page (along with all other posts). Its the same thing only different, and better.

Thematic theme was not displaying the contents of the posts, only the title of the posts when I made them display a given Category. One would have to click on the post to actually view it. Thats far to cumbersome! I also could not figure out the PHP they used, its much different than the other themes I had used in the past.

The navigation is all set, but now I have to go back and re-style everything as the CSS is totally different than the Thematic CSS! What a day!