Chirolupes and Classifieds

In honor of how I spent today...

The chirolupe, for all none of you who don't know about my website (I'm guessing here, but I don't think I've got much of a readership going), is a creature I created for my cyberpet adoption site, Skyhaven. As part of my neverending efforts to make Skyhaven a bigger, better, and less dreadfully boring and incoherent a place, I've been redoing my older adoptable critters, as inspiration hits. This time up, it's the chirolupes. They're getting a rather interesting new look, if I do say so myself. They were originally intended to be a sort of nocturnal griffin knockoff, combining a bat and a wolf instead of an eagle and lion. The new chirolupes seem closer to what I had in mind, something you wouldn't necessarily run away from, but nevertheless wouldn't want to see coming up behind you in the middle of the night. Or perhaps I'm delusional again...

The point of this (as much as there is a point to it) is that I've put quite a lot of time and effort into recreating something that probably nobody else cares about but me. After all, I've never had a complaint. (Well, I did have one person sign the guestbook a few years back saying that nobody would ever visit a site as verbose as mine. My hit counter proved them quite wrong, thank you very much.) I've never had anyone e-mail me saying,"Your site is great, but your chirolupes could sure use a more dynamic pose." The only impetus to improve them - to improve anything at any of my websites - is my own dissatisfaction with what I've created, and/or the need to continually polish and hone and improve my work. That, as mentioned, takes a lot of time and effort. It takes time and effort to look at what I've created, to think about what I like or dislike about it, and think of how it could be improved and how I could go about improving it. It takes time and effort actually sitting down in front of the keyboard or my sketchbook and scribbling, rambling, doodling, and editing my way to a finished product which may, in the end, bear little resemblance to the original product, or may have all of five words or half an inch worth of line changed. It takes time and effort to root out the old material and insert the new stuff, making all necessary updates and changes throughout my sites so that the internal consistency (what there is of it) remains relatively sound. And it takes time and effort to mull over and/or implement the ideas for further improvements and additions that always come with poking through my websites. That is time and effort that could've been going into... oh, say getting a job, or teaching myself another marketable job skill, or cleaning out my room so I knew what was going in the trash and what could be potentially hawked on eBay.

I've been working on getting myself employed again, believe it or not. I've been hitting every job listing site I can get bookmarked. I read the classifieds every day. I've also been trying, against major internal criticism and general slothful habits, to finish the second draft of that story I posted earlier, and to make something at my workbench specifically with the intent of selling it. I even had an application in my virtual hands this weekend. It never got turned in. (Technically speaking, that wasn't just a matter of me hemming and hawing, but a matter of fine print that wasn't made clear, deadlines that couldn't be met without access to my car - Mom and Dad had commandeered it, since theirs was in the shop -, and downloads that fought me, but the principle's the same.) I know that if I applied half the effort I put towards Skyhaven into the application process, I might have had a job offer by now. If I put a quarter of that effort into the armatures at my workbench, I might have something I liked enough to try selling. If I put an eighth of it into teaching myself how to feign enthusiasm in interviews... well, you get the idea.

They say ("they" being those people who make money telling other people how great it is that they're happily making money) that, when identifying what job to focus on, you're supposed to look at what you do when you have no other obligations. They neglect to mention that simply doing something, and doing something for money, are two totally different mindsets requiring two totally different skill sets, with two totally different motivations. Not that they can't be intergrated - I've seen it happen in others - but it's not as simple as deciding that you're going to make money and then opening the mailbox to find the paycheck. At least, for me it's not, because what I do in my free time isn't just draw and plot and create. It's staying out of the way and avoiding the Dread Demon Reality. It's what I'm best at, when all's said and done. I've been looking at the want ads for quite some time, and I have never once seen listed as a job qualification "Must be capable of staying out of the way" or "Reluctance to deal with other human beings a plus." So what I'm really doing with my free time isn't just potential Art or Graphic Design or Webmaster or Writer training. It's my own personal study course for a masters degree in getting nothing done.

Do I intend to give it all up? Wouldn't it be better just to bid adieu to my websites, flush my pointless little daydreams and all the effort I've wasted sharing them with the virtual world away, and redirect my efforts completely? Not on your life. Let's face it; my imagination's all I've got going for me at the moment, and I know me well enough to know that if I didn't have any creative outlet, I'd go nuts. I've been daydreaming all my life. I honestly feel sorry for people incapable of it, or of imagination on any scale. It boggles my warped little brain, how scared many people are of their own imaginations, what lengths they go to to supress it in themselves and others. So I have no intention of letting mine wither away as so many others have. I won't let the chirolupes die while it's in my power to keep them alive. Does that mean I'll never get a job and I'll be stuck in this hole for the remainder of my pathetic little life? I sincerely hope not. Other people manage to balance reality and fantasy. It must be possible. Determined as I am to hang on to my dreams (or daydreams, rather), however, that doesn't alter the basic facts of life. One of those facts is that unemployment ultimately leads to more problems than its worth, and it's exceptionally hard to be creative when one cannot afford the tools and materials to be creative with.

So tomorrow, it's back to the classifieds. Tonight, however, the chirolupes are calling...