Right, so I'm trying to make my living through craft.

This is a change for me. I was a ‘visual artist’ and then a ‘graphic designer’. It’s not a real change... but this time I’d like to combine the two. I’d like to make something that’s worthwhile making and make money.

There has been a huge resurgence in craft recently. Did you notice? It’s the children of the 70’s and 80’s and their nostalgia that drives it. Remember that hand tooled leather purse your mother had. Remember that crocheted jacket? It doesn’t matter the reason really, I still love that it’s in fashion, even if so much of it is NOT MY THING. After all, much of the world isn’t.

Grief is like water

It steals bits of your life, leaving you like debris on an unknown beach. Washed over and tumbled, pale and bleached.

It joins with all the other grief in a deep well and drowns you again. Nothing can ever be the same when you surface. If you surface.

Sometimes life is just brief moments of glistening happiness between sticky webs of grief....

On the subject of hoarding....

For ten years we've been throwing things out... and buying more things, but mostly throwing things out. There has been some headway, but on the whole the other things just seem to expand and no extra space seems to get made. We have one room that is particularly bad and under the house is bad too. Goat track material, but not too horrible in that it's 'stuff' not 'rubbish', although some would disagree. I've gotten a bit more serious about it in the last year or so, joining online help groups and trying to change the way I do things, the way I think. This is my Pinterest Board on the subject -- http://pinterest.com/rosz_craig/hoarding/

bored with being boxed in by assumptions

Unthinkingly, you always answer those questions rather than avoiding them cleverly. You know, the ones that box you in. The questions about where you work, about what you do.

When you do answer, you feel the conversation enclosing like a boa constrictor. The more you say about ‘work’ the less likely some new and interesting topic will be introduced.

The information is used, innocently, to assume things about you. Where you work and what you do for a living – these indicate things about you. Not necessarily correct things, or things you would want people to construe.

I used to say ‘artist’ – that, for the most part, would stymie people and cause them to have to think of something interesting to ask. They could assume you were poor, but generally they didn’t really know what to assume without more input.

When I ask people what they do, I’m going through the motions. Of course I’ll be excited if you are an artist (generally because I think I will have a good conversation – equally happy with scientists) or have something else in common with me so I can extend the conversation and practise being human. I will make assumptions too, but I always make every assumption with a grain of salt.

Really though, I don’t care what you do for a living – I want to know what you think.

Have I read this? Would I remember it?

Reading Vittorio the vampire by Anne Rice. I picked it up at the markets and had to buy it to get away from the nice-but-too-chatty marketer. I don't think I've read it before, but perhaps I wouldn't remember because it has very little substance. It is the slightly flowery language and it is the tapestry of the historical world. It is well written, but seems to lack something. I wonder if I look on my bookshelf if there is another copy or was it so nebulous I wouldn't have kept it? I'd like to think that my memory would at least retain books, but alas, lately.... I do tend to remember covers, but this cover is remarkably bad so I might have wiped it from my mind. Will I ever know and does it matter? Hanging out for the next installment of Game of Thrones.

Aged a hospital burden - The Sunday Mail page 6 Feb 28 2010.

A lovely impartial headline there. They aren’t quoting someone – that’s the title. I’m sure that would make older Australians feel great. You are a burden – shoot yourself now. Being older increasingly sucks, but once you get to ‘old’ our society seems to want to take away everything – your choices, rights and individuality. No longer happy with a lack of respect for someone who’s made it through life’s pitfalls to an advanced age, now we are openly begrudging. They need more aged care facilities, but rather than just building these purpose-built hells I suggest we create places that are multipurpose in every suburb. Child-minding combined with aged care and a community farm will do for a start. (And don’t even get me started about public transport and the aged!)

No creative control = No job satisfaction

I know it’s silly and unimportant in the big scheme, but I’m having a creative crisis.

I have little creative control in my work at the moment and it is cracking me up from the inside. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself it’s just work and that I have to do it to keep the roof over my head. Once you engage your creativity for a project, it becomes something else.

I keep telling everyone I’m not a real graphic designer and this proves it to me. I am much better at free-form creativity than following a plan. I am much better at following my own plans than working to someone else’s design. I will always resent it when I don’t get to decide where the thing I am engaged creatively on is going.

Graphic Design is where you present a draft based on the clients brief. They then tell you the ten things they forgot to mention. You redraft. They then change their minds and give you the ideas that five other people had. You then attempt to bolt everyone else’s creative ideas to yours and wonder why everyone couldn’t have gotten together and brainstormed in the first place. Brainstorming with other people is so much more acceptable than having to redesign or attempting to amalgamate ideas that don’t mesh.

While I’m whinging – The never-ending job – Where the client gives you changes in dribbles and continues to change even as the resource is deployed, so that you end up with a resource that goes out with different details and you begin to lose track of which version is correct. The client throws in a couple of incorrect details, so you will keep all your old versions, because you may need to go back to them – some versions go out with mistakes because of the client and some because you are confused. Some versions go out with mistakes because there are 5 different permutations of the job for different end uses and not all get updated during the rush to change, fix and meet deadlines.

Jobs just seem to run into each other now with no light at the end of the tunnel – it all seems endlessly wrong.

Next person who says that it must be nice to do ‘Art’ all day, gets it.

(Link is to - Clientcopia : Stupid Client Quotes... Because this is what designers do when they are sick of beating their heads against walls, and even fake designers do this....)