Scary! Eeek too hard must quit!

I haven't mentioned any of this before, but I'm going to grad school next year. I am so so thrilled. This whole "working" thing hasn't been that bad after all, but it will be great to revert to student mode and hide from reality for a few years again. And also, great to wear hoodies and my favorite paint-covered green corduroy pants all the time, because I'm going to be in ART GRAD SCHOOL. Aren't you jealous of how rich I am going to get with that degree? No? Well, you will be jealous when you hear that I'll be living in gorgeous Savannah. Glee, glee, glee!

When I was accepted to the program (which is for painting, by the way), I was really relieved and pleased but also sort of terrified and intimidated, because I didn't major in art in college and really have very little actual instruction in it. It's been a lot of self-taught stuff. And I only ever got around to teaching myself acrylics. So I was accepted, but I have a few undergrad classes as prerequisites first. Which is fine, because I totally would not want to start the grad classes feeling that I was behind everyone and like I had to work twice as hard just to catch up to what they had mastered years before.

So I signed up for a Saturday continuing ed class of HARDCORE OIL PAINTING. To give you idea of the hardcore-ness, it is called Academic Painting, and involves still lifes and figures and portraits. Like, serious traditional art. I have had 2 college drawing classes, so once upon a time I was okay at traditional drawing, but that was about 3 years ago. Now I paint abstracts and collages, which are really fun to do and end up being all swirly and colorful and pleasant to look at, but do not require HARDCORE CONCENTRATION AND DRAWING SKILL at all.

The first class was yesterday. It kicked my ASS. I was exhausted afterwards (staring and drawing and erasing and staring some more for 3 hours is pretty hard). It is going to be really good for me, though, and really challenging and I will come out of it much better, and I know this because I had to continually fight the urge to turn and run out of there and hide out at home eating Cheetos and watching old episodes of Cheers. Because I was scared and intimidated! People around me were excellent draw-ers. And excellent painters. And I...am out of practice. But by the end of the class I did not totally suck. My bottle and leafy vine looked life alien life forms, but my apple and green pepper actually did look like an apple and a green pepper. So that is a start.

And it's okay, because I will WHIP MYSELF INTO SHAPE! I will stop watching so much bad TV and I will sketch all the time and fool around with my new pretty oil paints and I will be a good draw-er again! Yes. Yes, that is what I will do.

Oh god. I totally will not.