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2001-06-03-9:18 p.m. Today I visited with a friend from school who is staying about 90 miles away from me for a week. She is living out of state on the other side of the world now and has been trying to pursue a career in art. She worked for a while at a commercial art school in this state and liked the teaching part but wanted to live in a cooler climate. I live in Texas. She moved to the east coast and got a job teaching art at a prep school there. This turned out to be a nightmare. The working conditions were poor - they required the staff to spend nights on the campus and forced them to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. She quit that job, thank the lord, and tried to make it doing her work independently and going to shows and fairs, without much success. Now she is trying to get a job in an art education program. While I admire my friend for trying to make a go of being a working artist, I must say that her experiences make working at the insurance company look pretty darned good. I love doing art but I wouldn�t want to be dependent upon the fickle tastes of the general public for my livelihood. I make my work for me. I�m also pretty sure that I wouldn�t want to teach. I don�t suffer fools gladly or quietly for that matter. She has also recently joined an online dating service. One of her friends joined the same service and is getting married soon. I�ve never been in a chat room or really had any interest in going into one. It all just seems so desperate. I think that I am as interested in establishing a relationship as any other never-married, forty-something heterosexual woman and I�m also painfully aware that I am not likely to meet anyone sitting here in my house but I just can�t make that the focus of my existence. This is perhaps the reason I am a forty-something, never-married heterosexual woman? **Disclaimer: All characters in this diary are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, real or imagined, is purely coincidental and unintentional.** |
