More than Two Letters

Today I ate the exact same lunch that I ate yesterday. I did not however, eat the same thing for breakfast. When I got to work I turned on my computer, hung up my coat and washed my hands in the exact same order as yesterday. I did not however, put the radio on the same station. There are patterns to my routine, but I break them for sole sake of breaking the routine. I like to see what kind of chaos I can create within my own head by changing just one little thing. Sometimes it works, other times I outsmart myself. Other times I'm just too lazy to try to trick myself.

Yesterday afternoon my boss came into my office to explain a new project. He preambled this explanation by telling me I would have to use Photoshop. Gulp. The more and more I listened, the more I realized something absolutely strange: this is literally the exact same project I did during my senior year of college. Here I am some years later doing the exact same something I did in an ART201 class. You're supposed to take this class as a Freshman but I waited until my senior year; I was the only senior in the class; I was more like my professor's TA than a student. All the underclassman frequently turned to me for advice and I specifically remember spending late nights in the lab with these "kids" teaching them how to use the crop tool. I even surprised some of them with a tutorial in filters! If you've never had exposure to Photoshop and you discover a filter(!) you think immediately filters are next to Napster in terms of just how awesome they are and how much you think they will change your life! Then you grow up and realize filters are lame. But that's a different story all together...

Life is cyclical, patterns are inevitable and things tend to repeat themselves even if there are years in between the cycle. While it's very odd that I'm essentially redoing a project I did so many years ago, it's also kind of amazing. For starters I've got a huge advantage over anyone else i.e my predecessor, who also worked on this project. The fact that I've done this before will aid me in providing a kick-butt final product to the client. The trial and error stage is thrown out the window. I can go right to the creative part; I can start now.

Furthermore and perhaps more importantly it proves, if only to me, that majoring in Art wasn't a complete waste of my time and that the $80,000 framed college degree resting on the shelf above me isn't just collecting dust, though it is doing that too. I've always thought that the smaller degree to its right, the one that says MASTER is the one I should be the most proud of; the one I spent two painful years obtaining; the one I moved to New York for; the one I took an enormous student loan for (sidenote: I will be paying that back until I am 55.) They say that the Master's degree is the new Bachelor's. And while that may be true, for this moment, for right now, I have never been more happy or proud to have a Bachelor's degree in Art, even if it's not the one that got me to where I am sitting right now.