Ideas and complications…

There are just so many ideas up in this ol’ head of mine; they rattle around up there bugging me with their noise, all wanting to be taken care of right now. I’ve never been so good at prioritizing things, and tend to try to do too much at once; it’s just my nature. For a while, back in my professor days, I had gotten that under control; I started to fit all of the many projects, potential projects, and crazy-ass ideas into the context of a long career arc. There were the pre-tenure, post-tenure, and emeritus ideas; yes I was already planning that far ahead. I may be a little bit crazy…

Nowadays I have trouble seeing that career arc anymore, so I tend to get a bit frantic; the moment I start one project I am already dying to start on the next seven as well. I want to write three books at a time, do cross-stitch, embroidery, and quilts, as well as get back into the gallery world (sort of). Some of this is just my nature, my tendency to take on too much, but more of it is the simple fact that I miss seeing that career arc ahead of me; I suppose I just want to find a way to jump right to that more stable place, a sense of security in my future practice.

There are a lot of things I miss about academia: the dialogue, the critiques, the students, the endless problems, and the insane hours (at least during the semester). What I think I miss most, though, is that sense of knowing what I was doing, where I was going. I’m not saying that I was comfortable or had a clue what I was going to do next; I just had a certain sense of continuity of what my practice was, a certain thread that ran through it all.

I am insanely happy here in this community, and doing what I do, but the jump from one project to another, the effort to piece it all together and find that arc may or may not be driving me batty. I keep supposing that one day it will all start to come together, that the sense of continuity will return. Until then I’ll keep slogging away and going at this all like a neurotic chipmunk preparing for the winter. Perhaps it makes me a bit too serious, prone to hyper-examination, but that’s the only way I know how to do this.

Maybe one day I’ll actually ease up a bit again, who knows, but in the meantime there is always something more to design, or write, or make. Speaking of which, how about a sneak peek at the end of 2013???

thomas-knauer-sews-fissiparous-peek

Yay neurotic chipmunks!!!

-T

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