money

Just got the cash for my help last week: 200 clams for 20 hours. I tried to work hard and smart both but I have a big twinge in my low back, and my shoulder is off. I was a beast of burden, was it worth it? no. (I framed in skylights tho!) But it does illustrate my shifting relationship to money. Soon after college I moved to the woods of mostly rural minnesota and tried my hand at being a studio potter. my rent was 125/mo, because there was no incoming water, no insulation, no easy heating. I accepted money from my parents for a few months to get started and then I didn't anymore, finding instead a job first in a cabinetry shop and then as a carpenter. For a variety of reasons, I didn't want their money. I needed to see my spine, know what I could do alone. Those became the best three years of my life. I left MN not knowing the full breath of all my accomplishments or the depth of my love. But they were not years characterized by gallery-hopping, expensive travel, or partying with other young people in or out of the arts/ crafts scene. sixty-hour weeks were common. and then there was the winter wood to split.

I worked through grad school, of course. Utah is not as generous to its grads as many others, so my parents paid the room and board if not tuition. And I worked as best I could when I got here. 11/hour doing teck work at a community college, 11 dollars worth of gas to drive each day. easier work than roofing, but where are we going, kids? it's not that helping the ceramics department at a sweet community college is beneath me or some shit, it's this: I was a lively thirty, thoroughly educated, in a vibrant city, and ready to get a move on. I talk to friends whose parents do not have the ability to help them get established the way mine do, and they don't hold it against me. Why should I hold it against myself to still keep a low overhead but accept the aide so lovingly given? a sense of hyper-equality? the remaining shackles of a socialized money-based measurement of worth? because my Pop is such a successful entrepreneur, that I too should be able to live up to his example? or is it more oblique: in a twisted hypocrisy, I labor to create and propagate objects that fit into lifestyles only the affluent can maintain in this strained economy/cultural mentality. I refuse this paradigm! I refuse to think that my work is relegated to luxury! would it have helped to have moved to Holland when I was still semi-portable? who knows, now I must doggedly create the world I have in my dreams, and possibly die a frustrated visionary.

look at what Rachel Maddow says about it

my battery is dying, I know this post was a frustrated ramble, I'm going to go make pots now. I don't know what else to do with myself. bye.