Doing Interesting Stuff.

The people you’ve been to school with are part of a class that, in your head, remains “back” where you left them five years ago. This may owe to a great part to my school per se, which had very few people who wanted to do the stuff I was interested in, which meant that as I became more involved in my professional/college lifestyle I lost track of what the engineers and science grads were doing.

Witness my surprise, therefore, when now and then I spot somebody I knew back in school actively going out and doing something interesting in the creative fields. Back in school I was a bit of a snobbish brat and did not really think there was much talent going around that wasn’t my own – so when I see the musician who’s performing in gigs across the metros or the photographer whose facebook gallery’s got almost a thousand “likes”, a part of me finds myself contemptuously assessing whether they have any genuine talent.

What surprises me in almost all cases is that they actually do. When I view or listen to the work of people I knew back then, I realise that (a) they were far more talented than the rest of us gave them credit for – or maybe they weren’t too intent upon the self-aggrandizing agenda; or (b) they’ve learnt a lot over the last few years.

This brings me to a point of painful self-reflection, about how I let most of my “talents” atrophy. I used to be able to write pretty darn well – even though I never really got around to making a name for myself outside of the school magazine, and even though writing to a large extent was viewed in my social class as still a womanly thing to be proficient at – I could actually, upon hindsight, have taken the extra-curriculars somewhere. Of course today I’m not at a position of regret in terms of what I did instead – I know a lot more about many topics than I used to and I like retaining the cerebral side of me – but I now recognise that there is indeed much to be said for sustaining a hobby uptil its point of excellence. The problem, as I pegged it down in the first year and still in some ways do, lies entirely with the environment. It’s very difficult to be the artist around people who don’t really value the products of the art beyond a “hmm that’s nice,” especially for somebody like myself who takes art a bit too seriously (this is wrong). While I know a couple of people who’re proficient at aesthetics and design in college it’s too easy to brush off their achievements as pastttimes since they dont come accompanied by intellectual pretentiousness about the aims of art and all that. This is another thing law school does to you, I guess. Screws up your priorities to forever prefer the form over the substance and the argument over the emotion. As a champion of this movement it’s slightly ironic that I complain.

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