Taming the Limner

Three months without an update, what am I a dying web comic? Scratch that - dying comic, cause uhm. I'm trying to write jokes... although, I am on the web...

How do I follow up my last post? The optimism, the pride - was I a different person? Art obsessed Tami works on pieces until they pass out over and over. Art obsessed Tami keeps a meticolous database of individually tagged references pictures and mood boards with hundreds of images for art styles to learn from. Post it notes of art ideas cover the walls like a beehive. The time to finish a piece became three days - a few years ago it was two months. My life has been bookmarked by artwork instead of events.

I was laid off. It was unavoidable - not performance based. When I got the news I was calm and understanding, but right after the news I fell to my knees crying. The original title for this post was "Paradise Lost" - I felt thrust out of heaven. I knew it was a possibility for the past year, but the thought of sending a resume sent me into panic attacks. The only way I've been able to mix work and passion was Taming.me, but never stuck as a long term habit like art.

The first week was hectic: I spent it finding every unemployment service for meals and rent and medicaid insurance, calculating my budget over and over, figuring out where to stay if I run out of money, getting rice and beans until my shelves were full. Rewrote my resume for each job opening and noted each in a Google Doc. Listed keywords and skills in Excel and connected each skill to a sentence to add to my resume. Every day and night I studied what I needed to catch up, and cried the rest of the time.

I feel awkward even writing this - my work self has always been divorced from everything else. Maybe I became ashamed. And I really don't know why. I've always dodged affection or anything that'd stoke my ego. I've sometimes felt like I'm at confession and I have to prove to them I'm bad. I don't know why I sabotage myself other than rejecting myself before others can do it. Despite my feelings, I got friends to mock interview me over and over. If my friends asked "How are you?" I'd jokingly overplain in a monologue what I was learning. Previously the running joke was fumbling over my words because I actually don't know how to respond. Do they want to know my medical problems? Or family? Or wikipedia articles I have open? Thousands of possibilities to steer the conversation, and I have to choose. There's been genuinely amazing conversations I've had but I've always stumbled onto the connection by accident. How do I just feed all of my life into someone's brain to find a match?

As you can imagine, I have trouble with talking to people. I avoid speaking by asking as many questions as I can. I don't do well with direct and undivided attention. I always attribute credit to others. I love being weird and making people laugh with my stupidity. And at first, this was OK because my resume wasn't getting attention... Three weeks after termination, three recruiters wanted to speak with me within three hours of sending a reply to my resume. OK I lied, it was within 1 hour I just wanted to alliterate. Allinumberate? Point is, I wasn't given any time to prepare. But I had been watching The Rehearsal by Nathan Fielder as my only social time the past week. If you're not aware, that show's ethos is we limit ourselves by our perception of our abilities and nature. People who don't feel capable can find confidence through pretending to be someone different. "Is this what a successful, nondesperate person would say?" raced through my head before everything I said. I didn't do amazing - at points my shakiness returned, but the recruiters spent so much time talking that they didn't notice. Communication skills aren't exactly the number one priority in my field anyways.

Two of those opportunities weren't good fits, but one felt perfect. The work promised an infinite budget for new tooling, so it'd be great for my resume. The hiring manager was imposing - he holds two Postgrad degrees and spoke with such conviction. He had asked during the interview my plan given this budget. While I did give a good answer, I followed up in the next interview by handing him a nine page plan for the first 90 days to outline the best available use of each tool. I spent five days straight writing and researching it. It came out of fear of rejection, but I also genuinely wanted to learn more. I'm constantly researching new technologies; at this point I kept to my daily Github commits for 5 weeks, and I still do now. Regardless, the doc was the final chip to win me over the other candidate that was way more qualified.

I was ready to start the following Tuesday. The job seemed really scary, but I felt ready to put aside art for now and let this be my life for at least the next six months. I could always pick it up again after I boosted my resume and got more connections. I was proud it only took 5 weeks to get placed!

...18 hours before starting, I got news they didn't have the money for me... I just felt done. The second rewrite of this post was just called "Once in a Lifetime"... Tami was going to be lying defeated covered by the brine of the beach. I've always struggled with feeling like nothing I did mattered. This feeling hasn't gone away. The miscommunication also became relentless for future interviews - I'd prepare for behavioral ones only to get coding challenges, they'd grill me on technical topics I never claimed expertise in, and interviews scheduled for an hour would be cut to 30 minutes while I wouldn't even get to mention my history. The worst of them all was when I felt a great connection with the hiring manager. We had a great conversation and they raised no complaints. I spent the next week working on Taming.me while I happilly awaited the good news. And then the internal candidate who declined the job decided you know what they'd like it afterall.

Don't worry, I have a job lined up in the end. It starts in a week, and like all of my above experience I didn't really do anything to deserve it. I was asked like one question, yet it's an insane salary increase for what was less work at my last job. I'm still a fool - I'm preparing for it even though I'm sure none of it will matter. Everyone's expecting me to take this time off to relax and "enjoy my freedom", and I really am trying to as I mash out this post in the cafe enjoying a very mid sandwhich. I normally would've spent my summers inside drawing relentlessly, but now I've sat at parks everyday reading and just staring at stuff.

Summer is ending. I lost my innocence, but I knew I manufactured it. As mentioned in Defending Your Life, I haven't wanted an art career. I appreciated the requests I've gotten from friends and wished I could fulfill them. I liked my weird life I had carved out for myself. I don't know if I'm going to ever be able to return to it – can Bilbo ever stay in the Shire? I had thought about taking a part time job and continuing my degenerate art lifestyle instead of what I'm doing now. Maybe it's not the right choice. I've been given a few opportunities to become my old self; echoes of past friend groups growing out of the soil of those evaporated.

This is all to say this site is changing. And by that I mean, it won't be changing. At least, not as fast as it used to. Going forward, I would like to do more streams on the weekends. I really enjoy listening to new albums with friends, so hopefully the Tolpa Power Hour returns. I have been enjoying IRL doodling and worldbuilding on paper. I hope to translate it to digital going forward - the laptop I used to draw on has now become my coding laptop. Once my work one arrives I'll be able to dedicate a space to art again. I want a healthier relationship with art, and with coding. Born out of curiosity, not this fear I've held for all my life. Why am I writing this? The blog post realistically should've just been a small update that this won't be my main focus for a bit. But that's not who I am, right?

I don't know, I'm not fully sure why I wrote all this. My Doodles and Daydreams section originally was to have a gallery for my low effort art - I wanted to get good at art that represented my life. I love writing, but haven't had the motivation since my D&D games dried up. I don't want to get a shooter sent up to my house, and there's fun in being the mysterious weirdo who you know nothing about. I've been that person for a while. Well, not a person. I didn't like being human. I rejected everything base and tried to carve out a new way of being. I think I'm ready for the humane and mundane now.