Never Knowing

You can spend your whole life obsessed with something. You can avidly read every book you can get your hands on regarding the subject between the ages of 5 and 15. You can continue to learn more and invest large amounts of time in this thing for significant portions of your adult life. You can teach other people to love it, you can learn repeatedly that you know less than many but more than some. You can own (and often study recreationally) a gigantic encyclopedia on the subject. You can have long, informed conversations on different points of strength and weakness with other enthusiasts and learn to recognize subtle characteristics in various specimens at a glance...

...and then sometimes out of the blue you will see an ad selling a distinctive breed of horse you never knew existed, only a few hundred miles away.

Life is just so vast. I suppose in some ways it is refreshing to know you can never run out of things to learn.

Relief

The feeling you get when you complete three websites, mail your wedding invitations and see that the physical manifestation of the book you designed looks good, all in one day.

Drawing Comparisons

Skills I acquired getting my BFA in printmaking that proved to be quite useful whilst making my own wedding invitations:

• the ability to quickly and neatly tear one very large sheet of paper into many smaller pieces of paper
• the mindset to be able to focus on a tedious, repetitive process for a ridiculously long period of time

Things about making my own wedding invitations that reminded me very much of being a printmaking student:

• getting ink all over my hands
• giving pep-talks to inanimate objects
• a feeling of deep exhaustion coupled oddly with hunger and a sore back that all combine into a sensation of spiritual desolation
• becoming progressively less and less exacting about page margin standards
  

Things about being a printmaking student not at all like making my own wedding invitations:

• having no responsibilities other than making prints
• having at least a semester to accomplish anything worth looking at
  

Things about being a printmaking student I missed very much whilst making my own wedding invitations:

• a tear bar
• being surrounded by a whole slew of other people who, like me, secretly really do care an awful lot about page margins
  

Questions raised both by getting my BFA in printmaking and making my own wedding invitations I suspect will never be answered to my satisfaction:

• why does the slovenly test-print on a scrap always come out better than the carefully-prepared-for final run on good paper?
• why am I doing this?
  

Things I might have done had I gotten a degree in something more practical than printmaking:

• landed a real job after graduation
• hired someone else to make my wedding invitations