Was His Demise So Carefully Constructed

As a student of design, there are a few things that are drilled into you from the beginning. The first and foremost being that you are not an artists. You do not make art. Design and art are inexplicably seperated by the vasty seas of wanting to seem more professional than all the other wankers in the Art School.

At Herron, so pervasive is the cock-jockying that it is the Herron School of Art and Design. I am still an art student... everyone calls me an art major. Now I just sound pathetic trying to make the stupid distinction between the two. There is a definite distinction, and if you know anything about the two it will jump out and bite you in the face. (Designers are soulless corporate cum-dumpsters while Artists are self-important wastes of otherwise marketable water and carbon). But to the layman, that's like trying to explain the largely superfluous differences between AMD and Intel. The reply is always "Who gives a shit?"

So it is a hilarious irony that has us always describing things as compositions and pieces. I have to turn in 50 pieces by Friday or whatever. I could be in Drawing 35 for all I know. Except that my pieces are inane bullshit about balancing the use of light and dark and not about anything anyone else would give a shit about. An Art Student can take his Painting 2 shit home and mom and dad say, "Gee son, that's a beautiful bowl of fruit." I take my VC 1 stuff home, and everyone wonders why they are paying $20K a year for their son to arrange like... 15 colorful squares on a blank field.

Another problem is that even more so than art, non-designers don't know how we shit, let alone how we work. (and there is a very special designer shitting ritual.*) If I draw a dude, you can at least judge it based on whether it looks like a gremlin with down syndrome or a person. If you look at my page layout you don't really see the difference. If you can fucking read it, you call me a success and move on... which is like telling you that your food doesn't have botulism, there for you are a good cook. It's a nice feeling, but you clearly don't have a goddamn clue. (not that you should, this is the most esoteric , worthless field in creation, basically histories greatest con job, after philosophers).

Which takes me to the next problem: Designers like artists are a bunch of self-important, arrogant twats that want nothing so much as to have sex with themselves. That translates to dick in commradre and support for you fellow designer. If I get excited about my new design for my lead page of an art-book (for my not art), the only people who could even begin to understand why I have a boner will only tell me my dick is too small. Talking about design theory to designers is like talking about politics to guitar majors, they are quite sure you're an idiot and that you're just conforming to some one's stupid notion, when it's obvious the only reasonable thing is to conform to their stupid notion.

So this gives us a frustrated, twitchy Mike, who has a whole bunch of praise from people who love him dearly but don't know what he's doing, and a whole bunch of shit from holier-than-thou fellow design students quite sure they have solved the problems of the world with their newest san-serif font. All the while, I'm plugging away in various Adobe programs struggling to last through college and get to the other side where he can have the freedom to work from home away from all the assholes masturbating in front of their mirror.

-Chow

*there is no shitting ritual, I lied.