I can’t decide whether or not you’ll be surprised that I was originally an art major in college. I really don’t play the part of a brooding artist. I’ve never dyed my hair and I’ve never worn all black. The only thing that’s pierced on me are my ears. So it’s probably fairly obvious to you that I didn’t fit in so well with the art crowd. I was far too normal….. I heard that! Shut up. I can be normal. But with every class I took, I felt more and more out of sync with the other students. My minor was in Spanish, and I definitely fit in with those guys better.

During my junior year, I had to take an elective so I took an advertising class and I fell in love. These were my people and advertising combined art and business! And hey, I could probably make some money doing this, because “starving artist” didn’t quite appeal to me. So I filled out my paperwork, marched over to the Journalism and Mass Communications  department and changed my major. I had already accumulated enough credits to have a minor in art, so that’s what I ended up with. I have a BS in Advertising and minors in Spanish and Art.

I had been brainwashed into believing I’d never use an art degree. This is truly the greatest regret of my life and I tend to live regret-free. I love art. I love all things art. Only a person who truly loves art could spend an entire semester on color and absolutely love it. And the actual field of advertising I ended up hating. It turned out that the only thing I loved about it had been the art part. I would have been better off with a degree in Journalism. Or so said one of my professors who had been a reporter for CNN for 20 years. I was grilling him over a project we had to do and exasperated he said “You should really think about changing your major to journalism! You’d make one hell of a reporter.” Lol. But alas, it wasn’t in the cards.

I guess you can say that the hobbies I pick up are creative/ art type hobbies. And I do teach art (volunteer) at my children’s school, but it still doesn’t quite satisfy the itch. I’m toying with the idea of going back to school and getting a master’s degree in art. Both kids will finally be in school all day in the fall and I’ll have so much time to myself I won’t know what to do with myself! I guess I’ll see how it all plays out. My plan right now is to just start taking some classes and see where it leads me. Unfortunately, I’m not 20 miles from one of the West Coast’s top art colleges anymore.

I have to say though that I’m 15 or so years out of college and I never use anything I learned in advertising anymore. However, the art stuff really comes in handy sometimes. Like when we were moving and wanted to touch up the paint in our house and found out they didn’t make the paint color we needed anymore? I told Steve I would mix some paint by hand and touch up. He was frustrated and irritated and snapped “We don’t have time for you to spend three days and countless hours trying to match the paint! It will look like hell!” I got it right on the second try. And it was flawless. You couldn’t even tell. Hey, I didn’t spend a semester on color for nothin’!

So remember that 6 week long project son #1 has been working on? Well last night he was in a rush to finish it and he blew it. Totally screwed up hours and hours of work. He cried and cried and I was finally able to help him salvage it. He just had a few things left to do tonight and he tried to rush through it again and it went FUBAR. I mean, I had tears in my eyes because I thought there was no way we’d be able to recover this. And it’s due tomorrow so there wasn’t time to redo it. And I was ticked at him. I had repeatedly warned him to slow down, use pencil and be careful, and he just completely ignored me. So while he threw himself on his bed and cried his eyes out, I wore a hole in the carpet walking circles around the project and thinking about how this could be fixed. I finally decided I was going to have to mix up some paint to match the color of the poster board and carefully paint over the lines he had drawn in sharpie marker. About 20 minutes later he came downstairs and saw what I was doing. “Oh thank GOD!” He sagged with relief. “Oh thank God, thank God, thank GOD you have an art degree. NO ONE but you could have ever figured out how to fix this, Mom. Oh thank God, thank God.” He did a lot of God thanking. lol. And in the end, you can’t tell his project was a total wreck. It even looks like he decorated it on purpose that way. And they said I’d never use an art degree……