It's 7:30 and I've very nearly polished off a bottle of champagne by myself. This temporary working situation makes me more tired and in need of liquor than I'd like. On the positive side, it also makes me more productive. I've done more drawing, more painting, more writing, more digital fuckery, and more film stuff than I did for the first five months of unemployment. Now I'm trying to coordinate volunteering at the Art Institute and a hopeful internship at the MCA in addition to freelancing somewhere on top of everything else.
It's also been an extremely bizarre/awesome freelancing experience. I'm working at Thirst/3st, which is run by Rick Valicenti. I believe I wrote a fawning blog three years ago about meeting him for the first time when he spoke at my college and being invited to go to dinner with him, several faculty and graduate students, and one other undergrad. That other undergrad is my roommate who works for Rick now and whose shadow I am eternally living in. A year ago I ran across Bud (the name of said roommate)'s hairline and hands in Print magazine holding up one of 3st's posters. Two or three years ago John Pobojewski was one of the “twenty under thirty” designers and now I'm sitting with him working on typesetting stuff for Lyric Opera in Chicago. Last Friday the designers of Barack Obama's campaign logo came into the office to share their experiences working on the logo and doing a majority of Obama's television ads. Rick is basically trying to build a design empire in Chicago suitable to his vision. 3st has gone beyond for the most part designing for clients and is now designing for designers. Their primary clients are art institutions and architects. They're doing identities and websites for firms that are building Dubai, the true center of contemporary progress. One of 3st's projects you might have seen was the editorial page for the New York Times a year ago that featured new additions to the lexicon. I remember seeing that, thinking the lolcat was terribly inaccurate, and then noticing that it was done by 3st. Bud, my roommate, did the Lolcat. An interesting tangent to this meandering post is that Bud was the first person I ever met at college. He was in my group at orientation and I thought he was a huge asshole. Then he was in my very first class and sat next to me. Turned out I was bad at first impressions.
Augh. What I'm trying to say is I've been thrust into a situation that seems like it should be beyond my means. It is so confusing that I can enter into this situation and perform well, yet none of the bullshit jobs I have applied to for the past five months have even gotten back to me. This whole adult life is really weird.
I thought I'd written more here. I'm watching the Dark Knight again. It's filmed in Chicago with minor effort taken to hide that fact. Matt (the boyfriend) and Tara (his roommate) are building a K*nex rollercoaster. Tara just said “that's a full circle.”
With that Jess, I end this.