Career Anxiety

I think I have found out what my problem is when it comes to choosing a career. When I was young, I always loved the fact that I could be anything I wanted to be. Now, that is exactly my problem. There are too many options. It makes me want to consider having children in different countries just so that they have fewer opportunities than I have.
I know that there are some things that I could never do. I can't be a neural surgeon, or an astrophysicist, or anything along those lines. However, there are no careers that I can actually rule out, because I simply haven't found my passion. When I was talking to my sister yesterday, I told her that I'd like to be a director because you can make your own plan. It's not like a boring office job where you come in every day for a set amount of time, but it's not like being an artist, where you can decide whether you do it or not. People expect things of you and give you praise when you do them right.
I had a job over the summer. I lasted a week. One of the things I hated about this job was that there were so many things you had to do but you never knew what they were or how to do them properly. I suppose this might have been because I was new and hadn't learned all of the ropes yet, but I could never get used to that kind of anxiety. If I were the director, I would know what to do and tell people what they had to do because I would be in charge. Even if I had no idea what I was doing, I could learn on the job without terrible consequences.
I may be romanticizing this idea, but it's one of the only careers that I've given serious thought. The only problem is that I have very little experience actually directing.
A lot of the people I've spoken to say that you don't need to know exactly what you're going to do with your life, especially in high school. The problem is, I'm the kind of person that likes to know what to expect. I can't shake the feeling that I'll screw up if I don't have some kind of plan, if I don't have some kind of stability. I'm not opposed to going with the flow; in fact, I enjoy it. But I can't survive without having something concrete to look forward to.

A Painting by Bonnard

I chose this painting because it looked very one-dimensional at first, but I got a very different impression of it after looking at it for several minutes. I remembered Michael Kimmelman saying something like this in Chapter One of The Accidental Masterpiece. 
It looked like Marthe was only present from the waist down, but then I saw that she was actually bending over and that her head was simply much darker than the rest of her body. I think this creates a pretty cool effect. The thing that jumped out at me the most was the dog lying on the ground. It was a dark, solid, rust-colored shape which was a stark contrast to the rest of the predominantly pastel piece. I was also pleasantly surprised when I noticed the bathtub in the bottom left corner. I thought that it was typical for Bonnard to incorporate his beloved bathtub into the piece even though it wasn't technically being used directly.
I love how Bonnard uses all of these colors which would normally overpower the senses but uses them in such a way that makes the painting scattered and cohesive at the same time. The different shapes throughout the piece constantly pull my focus from place to place and keeps me captivated.

A Moment in the Life of Pierre Bonnard

Independent Work Day #1

Luke told me that in order to make my work less experimental, I should set more limits for myself. This includes writing out titles, summaries, and lengths for each story before I write them. I understand that this will help me know when to stop writing, but it is very hard for me because I am used to wandering from my original ideas. I feel like all of the concepts that I came up with are better to work with long-form, so I either have to adjust the ideas or adjust the project. Even though it is only the first day, I feel like I would rather be in one of the movie groups. That would be more fun for me than torturing myself for a story.

Independent Project

I want to write a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories. I plan on working on it for the rest of the year. I don't know yet how long each story will be, but I guess I'll find out when I get started. One of my biggest challenges is that I haven't written creative fiction in a long time, let alone anything about my life. I have never been one for diaries. I also tend to have problems with remaining passionate about projects, which is why I prefer to work short-form, so that my passion only has to extend for a small amount of time.

The Accidental Masterpiece

On the first day of school, we were assigned the introduction of The Accidental Masterpiece: the Art of Life and Vice Versa by Michael Kimmelman to read by Friday. I automatically groaned in my head. It's not that I thought it would be bad, as most of the other reading assignments I've been given in STAC have managed to grasp my interest. I was still in that summer funk that having no work to do gives me. Naturally, I put off the reading until two periods before STAC on Friday. I decided early on to underline the things that I found intriguing or compelling, but quickly realized that this was impossible, as almost everything on those six-or-so pages was both intriguing and compelling. I found myself underlining entire paragraphs and even occasionally annotating (yes, annotating!). It was so well written that it was impossible to find a single dull sentence.
By reading, I learned of a great artist who became so captivated with a woman that she was the focus of all of his pieces. I also learned of a dentist whose infatuation with light bulbs led him to leave patients during procedures, just to give tours of his little museum. What I took from these stories is something that I think of every time I look around the STAC room: you can't choose your obsession. Nor can you choose when or how it takes hold of you. People can choose to paint or act or write, but no matter how much you try, you cannot make yourself love it. It simply happens or it doesn't. People might want to be obsessed with art, but nobody in their right mind would choose a fixation on light bulbs. That's why I think that careers in the arts are so noble. An accountant might like math, but it will never dominate his thoughts and feelings the way that writing does for authors. People in the arts don't settle for anything less than what captivates them, while others may wuss out and take the road that they are told they should take. Artists make their own decisions based on their inherent love for art.