I am exhausted.
Em has been sick. (She had another febrile seizure, which took about ten years off of my life and harmed her not at all.) I have been sick. Steve has been sick. Nobody has been sleeping. Work has been frustrating. School has, of course, not slowed down for any of it.
I find I am afraid to take a breath. If I stop, I may never be able to make myself start again.
I have this theory that I'm getting through my classes mostly on momentum. Read the assignments, follow instructions, submit everything on time. Be polite, cheerful, and chatty. Actual talent, at this point, seems unnecessary, as long as I have enough to translate the lessons I'm supposed to be learning into a visual. And if I disagree with a critique from the instructor - I make the change.
That may be the biggest difference between the student I am now and the student I was.
In one of my earlier classes, one of the students was complaining in the chat room about one of his instructors. He was dinged, he said, for using the wrong color of paper for his assignment. It was a design class, he reasoned; how could they possibly justify dinging him because he used his imagination and thought outside the box? The thing is, though, that in a professional situation he's going to be dealing with people who want X and not Y, and they won't care a bit that he prefers to do a design with Y - or even if Y is a better choice. Their game, their rules. Schoolwork is much the same. I may have thought my original texture design fulfilled the requirements of the assignment, but my instructor didn't. Guess who gives out the grades? And in addition to that - regardless of whether I was "right" or not, I thought more about what I was doing and pushed my imagination a little further. I am learning; I am not creating designs for my own enjoyment.
My age doesn't hurt me here. I've been working long enough to know that you can create the most perfect, efficient, elegant solution to a problem; but if the guy you're solving it for doesn't like it, it gets tossed. End of story. I'm hoping someday people will pay me to do design, and if they tell me they don't like a draft I'm going to smile, nod, redo the project, and keep the check.
Is it crass to be mercenary when I'm going to art school? Too bad.