Following up on my July 15 update, my job search has begun in earnest.  I learned today that staying at my current job is not going to be a possibility due to some major funds falling through, but maybe it's just as well (for me).

I love where I work, but I wasn't altogether sold on the position I stood to apply for.  While it would have given me a chance to prove myself and exceed my own expectations (as if, my expectations always stay one step ahead of me), it might not have been the ideal job for me.

So, where does that leave me?

It's sort of liberating to have that choice off my mind with no effort on my part, but now I must put out my feelers and eventually settle on a job.  Yesterday I applied for perhaps the most exciting one, a position with Teach for America developing video and multimedia online learning opportunities for teachers.  I love TFA and I love video, despite the fact that I'm slightly underqualified.

Most interesting is how I played up both my non-profit experience (with a focus on urban public education) and my fine arts background in my resume.  Somehow, I found a position that utilizes the past several years of my life experience.  For that reason I've become sort of partial to this job, and may actually be pretty disappointed if I don't get it.  We'll see, and in the meantime there's nothing to do but keep looking.

Crafts were the first art form I experienced growing up: my mom is a flea market and craft fair addict and I more often than not tagged along with her, then and now.  Mom also makes jewelry (beautiful earrings, mostly) and gave me a knack for piecing together little projects at the dining room table after work.  My craftiness has migrated to a job at my uncle's cabinetry shop in middle school, zines in high school, home-built stretchers and frames for my paintings in college, and a love for wintertime knitting and crochet passed down from my grandmother and great-grandmother.

Baltimore has a fun, active, and diverse indie craft scene.  One of my coworkers, Christy Zuccarini, recently landed a gig with the Baltimore Sun writing the Baltimore By Hand blog.  So far it has been extremely aesthetically pleasing in addition to being a great read.  Plus, knowing another Baltimorean who blogs about art makes me feel part of a scene -- you should check out Christy's blog at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/crafts/.

This weekend we spent a three-day weekend in Brigantine, NJ for some well-deserved beach and family time.  I debated taking my whole camera bag, supposing that my purse-sized Lumix would do the trick.  In the end, though, I almost always end up packing all my gear in case I should be overcome by a sudden urge to take pictures that require Camera Raw, 10 megapixels, off-camera lighting, or a tripod.

Nothing like a relaxing weekend at the beach, enjoying the company of six people crammed into a two-bedroom bungalow.  Oh, and some ambitious photography projects on the side.

Predictably, I was somewhat disappointed in myself when I returned home with no pictures, but I'm left to wonder: do I beat up on myself too much?  Like in every other aspect of my life, do my high standards hinder me more than they help?

In college, I had a professor who firmly believed visual art -- and painting in particular -- should be our whole lives.  Unless we walked/ate/slept/dreamed painting, we could not call ourselves true artists.  This mentality dealt the final blow to my enthusiasm for a visual arts degree in large part because I gave up on some big dreams earlier in life because I couldn't bear the thought of that fierce intellectual monogamy.  Now someone was trying to force it on me, something I just couldn't swallow.

The bottom line is photography will never be my whole life.  Nor will writing or music or sewing curtains for the spare bedroom.  Sometimes a walk on the Atlantic City boardwalk is just that, a walk on the boardwalk.  No analysis, no careful and particular observation, no being left behind because no one wanted to wait for me to create the perfect shot.  There will be weekends for that.  I can plan a whole series of work around the Jersey Shore, allot entire weekends to my images.

Maybe it's also okay for me to come home from a weekend at the beach with no photography to show for it.  Maybe, for this weekend, I was defined by my place in my family as opposed to my place behind the camera.  While I sometimes envy people whose cameras are a permanent part of them, even they go through dry spells.  I'll never be shooting constantly, but I hit a pretty good rhythm with consistency.   Some days other pursuits just take precedence, and that's an important part of how I live and work.

This isn't something I should feel guilty about.  I am not a single-minded person with a perfectly crystallized identity and direction to my life.  I am a grazer who wanders through and past just about everything.  I used to beat myself up over this part of myself, but I've come to know its unique pleasures and advantages as well.

Even if to the outside world it looks like I'll never get my act together.

Most people with visual art degrees don't end up "using" their degree as a primary career.  While I would argue the meaning of "using" any kind of college degree, I certainly can't claim to have landed an "art job" after graduation.  I've taken what I feel must be a common route and begun a career in the non-profit sector.  (As a side note, that explains my disappearance for two weeks as I most certainly did use my degree to help write 17 grants to help local schools).

Sort of disenfranchised by the "art world" and sick of feeling like New York City was the center of everything that mattered, I struggled in my last semester of undergrad to figure out what "career" really meant to me.  I knew one thing: it didn't mean money and corporate success, though I know I could succeed in that sense if I had the inclination.  So I signed on for a year of AmeriCorps*VISTA (think domestic Peace Corps) and found a niche in a quirky but awesome non-profit here in Baltimore.

I made a choice.  Plenty of my former colleagues are probably sucking up to galleries trying to get representation, and I know a few have found very well-deserved success.  But I made another choice and created a different identity for myself.  Now I have a choice again.  My VISTA year is ending, and as of August 15 I am no longer property of the U.S. Government.

What will I do?  I have a choice to stay in the vein of urban public education, stay in the vein of urban youth, stay in non-profits, or start over entirely.  This process of reinventing myself every year or two has to stop.  For one, I have a lot of trouble concentrating on the "fun" side of life when all I have done for the past six years is change concentrations, schools, jobs, and towns.  By signing on for a year-long contract position, I've forced myself to make another choice and another change.

Though my diploma calls me an artist, I could be happy at any job and do well almost anywhere I landed.  The question is, how many of those jobs really matter?  Last night as I was falling asleep I thought of all the children I have gotten to know in Baltimore this year and wondered where they were sleeping, what their houses were like.  I wondered how, having done so much, I can just walk away, another college-educated white person who has done a year's time in the inner city trying to make the world a better place.  That's not me.  Personally, if I believe in something I want it to be a way of life.  I can't walk away from all those children to work in the coat room at the BMA, or even to be an office manager at Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts.  Can I?

Again I'm at this crossroads with my career, wondering which identify I want to run with this time: the visual artist; the nerdy kid who loved physics, calculus, and psychology (though not necessarily in that order); the writer; the Habitat for Humanity volunteer; the underpaid non-profit employee who worked overtime with a team to put in $250,000 in grant proposals last week; or the woman who worked tirelessly in a public school in Baltimore for the past year.  Somewhere, sometime in the next few weeks, I'll find it.