fraggle

This past week was really hard to deal with, I hope the next one (this one?) goes better..

San Francisco was ok, I kind of left it on a sour note because me and my sister and her fiancee started talking about rather uncomfortable things. Being that they're 35 and I'm 22 I realize that they know some things I don't; but at the end of this last trip I think I left feeling that there's just some things that we're just not going to see eye to eye on..

So they're both successful lawyers, and very interested in what I'm doing after I graduate. I tell them I hope to perhaps spend a year abroad, and live in L.A.-ish area for a while after that; they're less interested in the kind of "life" I want then what my long-term plans are; I never ran into such antaganism towards my usual attitude of disregard-for-conventional-standards of success before... They said that going abroad is great, but that it will put me "behind" in finding my career. I tried to tell them I wasn't that worried about finding a particular job; I tried to tell them that what's important to me is having a day job that doesn't invade my life so much that I can't pursue my "projects" (I never know how to describe them or explain them to people; the things I write, draw, put together; the kinds of things I've been spontaneously doing since I have conscious memory and that I always thought could make alot of people happy if only I was allowed to develop them.. or something) at night, or on weekends... I know for a fact, having seen the life my sister had to lead in order to become a lawyer, that going down her path would prevent me from working on projects even worse than college has... it turns out that either I have a serious deficiency in explaining what "projects" means or I was trying to explain this concept to the wrong people; because I think they took that to mean that what I want is a job where I can whack it and go party every night and have alot of "free time", which they very painstakingly explained is a very unrealistic goal. "No, this is 'free time' that would have a definite function! I'd be working towards developing other projects.. that I could perhaps publish and sell!" I tried to explain..

The conversation started turning really bad when they both said that, in general, work is hard and sucks and people don't want to do it; which I of course have heard two zillion times but then I made the mistake of asking: don't you guys enjoy your work? They both said no. I was kind of suprised at this; something i feel I'm being told alot here and now is that, if nothing else, you've got to get a job that makes you happy; at least to *some* degree, since you'll be theoretically spending alot of your life doing it...

But these kids are just not on that track. They totally turn out to be in it just for the money; when I asked him what they'd be doing as a job if they could do anything, he said he'd be sitting around, watching tv, playing video games, doing not much of anything. I asked "gardening? bar-tending?" because I had been wondering what they would do as a *job* if they could do anything; it struck me as super strange that he seemed to be saying that his natural impulses or whatever were to do *nothing*; I mean, if he's unhappy in his high-power office job, then it seemed logical to wonder what kinds of things would make him happy if he could be doing something else; it seemed wierd that he seemed to be implying that there was nothing else in the world he could imagine doing with his life... I kind of said "So you can completelly separate your relaxing-life from your career?" trying to get to what it was that made him able even to tolerate a life where he completelly enjoyed nothing about his work and everything about *nothing* that happens after work... At this he EXPLODED: "You HAVE to!!.." he went off on just about probably everything he could think of; I don't even remember anymore; just about how competitive the high-paying jobs are, how hard and long you have to work to get them, and how much you have to sacrifice in order to have the luxury of retiring at 45, and how not-fun it is and how much people who think they can get away with not dealing with that are going to meet failure in the face...

What made this worse is that, for some reason, my eyes started watering around this point and I was choking back tears; I hate it when I'm clearly crying even though I really, really do NOT want to; I knew that it would look like I was crying because I was having big, mean Reality shoved in my face to crush my illusions; but the real reason I was getting upset was that up until that point I had been thinking "well, not everyone understands the starving-artist thing, some people have to have it demonstrated to them that you have skills or whatever or at least that you find profound joy and can perhaps, in all hopes, bring profound joy to others through a medium that doesn't necessarily make money in this world.." But then, as he was going off and as it became clear my sister was agreeing with him, I started wondering whether there would EVER be a point, no matter how "successful" I became by my standards; no matter what my 'projects' yielded in the future, when my sister and her future husband would be able to comprehend the meaningfulness of that, and see that as a "success", and I was starting to develop this impenitrable, sudden feeling of non-support from their side, for these things I live to do but can't explain, and this sense that nothing I ever could accomplish in my 'field' would register with my family as worth spending as much time as it would require on it, was so pressing, and so hurtful to think, that the tears were coming and my sense of dignity couldn't stop them. They of course thought I was tearing-up because I was having my illusions torn apart, and he was saying at the end "I hope we didn't .. um... depress you too much.." and later, driving, my sister said, "I hope we didn't say things that.. um... you didn't want to hear.." but at that point, although I wanted, for purposes of my pride, to explain to them that that wasn't the reason I was upset at all, I couldn't find a way, couldn't think it worth it to try, to explain the real reason to them.
I had gone after the conversation to the bathroom and broken into silent sobbing, with images flashing in my head of us all getting older, mom and dad passing away and leaving just me and my siblings and this fiancee as a family, and that no matter what I did, no matter how many other people became appreciative of my work or how well I thought my work was going, that this family would never see the value I would wish people would see in it, and they would never see my work as not wasting-time, all because of this different alignment with reality which we have and that we won't give up. The feeling that I had to give up the hope that my closest relatives would always really, down deep, be in support of what I chose to do with my life if I really believed it was worth doing; that their concept of what "success" meant was that impenitrable, that unchangeable...

I don't know... I always knew my dad wanted me to go to law or business school so i'd have something to "fall back on," and when i say i could "fall back" on a job at a liquor store if it leaves me time to work on my projects for a good part of the day, he sort of backs off, although i know this is a dissatisfying answer to him. But these two kids seem to be equating non-success, in the material sense, with death; and it doesn't seem like something they'll get over either; it seems like the kind-of American Dream of striving towards wealth, of "as much money as possible" being the criterion of having succeeded enough, is really how they see things... Which is fine and all; but when it comes to my trying to explain alternate forms of success which I see as the only way I'll be happy in life; success in making an artwork/writing/performance (i don't even friggin know what sort of creator i am; i can't narrow myself down, maybe i'll never be able to...) which would really be worth seeing; which would make people glad they saw it; leave the theater feeling better... I'm so damn amorphious on that; but it's just really sad that that form of success has no meaning for some folks... Counts, maybe even, as a dillusional form of a goal. I really hope my sister doesn't think of me as a person with warped aspirations... I think she might, though...

...there's a chance it all could be miscommunications... But it was a really sad note to leave sf on.. I still feel sort of sick in my stomach because of it...

This is probably super-long by now... It's always theraputic to have this journal to lay my anxt down on I'm sorry I never seem to read anyone else's pages recently; just spit down my own journal and go... But I wish I could go to everyone's page who always comments on my entries and say thanks when I get more time I'll indulge myself in more sg goodness...