An Introduction, Part 3

Well this is starting to look more like a biography than an introduction.

So, last time I left off with that nasty word "reality." That meant thinking about what I was going to do for a long term career. It was time for college and I had to start thinking about what I was going to study. Strangely enough, art was not one of the majors I was considering. My father, as much as he liked art and nature, was always very negative about the prospects of earning a living doing art. The only artists are starving ones, you know. On top of the belief that all artists are starving my father also believed life was not about doing what you want to do, only about doing what you had to do. He even told me once that if I was having fun I was doing something wrong. Eek! (He grew up in New England during the depression years so I suppose it was the whole Puritan work ethic thing.) Consequently, I must have been convinced from an early age not to consider art as a possible college major because the thought of studying art actually never even occurred to me during my college years. Wierd, huh?

Unfortunately, when you remove someone's true love from the list of options there is nowhere to go. I ended up bouncing around from one major to another like a ball in a pachinko machine because I could find nothing that I truly wanted to make a career out of. This meant I also spent way too many years in college, but I won't bore you with all the details of those long years or the subjects I studied. I'll just jump ahead to graduation and the one thing that someone said that changed my life.... (continued in Part 4)