Chasing Discontent, or: Why Was I Ignoring My Signature Color?

Once upon a time, I was desperately in love with two things that did not love me back: art school, and a boy who went to art school.


It’s difficult to say which of these two Great Unrequited Loves was more doomed. They were inextricably linked. My boy was in love with art school, and art school was in love with my boy.

Art school was, sadly, never ever going to be in love with me. For one thing, I didn’t actually go to art school. I went to Douglass College at Rutgers University. Why? Because my mom (strike one!) wouldn’t let me (strike two!) spend my college fund (striiiiiike three!) on a BFA. So instead I took the train to Philly every weekend, where my Boy and his boys went to school and hung out in a tight group that resembled either a pack of semi-goofy dogs or a nest of hungry vampires, depending on your point of view.

This boy, my would-be Love, was to art school as a duck is to water. Except not a duck, because that implies that he was awkward when on land, and that was not true. He was never awkward because he didn’t go on land. He took the water with him wherever he went and convinced others, this land mammal included, that they would really, really be happier and more at home in the water with him than on their native solid land.

So there I was, a gangly gazelle whose natural habitat was in a dry English classroom, spluttering and barely keeping afloat in the lake that housed my Duck and his art school buddies.

While I could have been happily munching clover and reveling in the brilliance that is e.e. cummings with fellow four-legged creatures, I was instead spending my weekends attempting to understand Cy Twombly and wondering why in the hell it was OK for Art School Ducks to play Street Fighter for hours when television was deemed a verboten, fratboy-esque activity.

I also spent a lot of time contemplating the phenomena that allowed the Ducks to listen to Eminem ironically but not to enjoy the brilliance of the Pretty in Pink soundtrack.

Needless to say, I kept my Dixie Chicks albums well hidden in my sock drawer.

At any rate, my stalled love affair with both my Love Duck and art school ended in a single instant of clarity that left me feeling easy breezy CoverGirly and a little light headed.

What happened was this:

We, the Ducks and I, were squashed into a broken-down-but-oddly-still-cool sedan of the “look at me, I’m a struggling artist” variety. I was bored. I also smelled bad because, by this point, the Ducks had graduated from art school and moved to a studio space in Brooklyn that had no bathroom. I was spending the weekend and had not yet figured out exactly how to go about insisting on a shower.

As both the token girl and the token Mammal Disguised as Water Bird, I was riding bitch. My unrequiting Love Duck was driving, lecturing, and gesticulating wildly. He was talking about how horrible happiness was, and how much he loathed the idea of it.

“People who are content are boring,” he said. “I don’t ever want to become content. You can’t make good art if you are happy. Good art comes from struggle.”

All of this was to explain why he was glad that his apartment didn’t have heat of any kind. At all.

In retrospect, I think that my Duck, who has, against all odds, grown up to be a pretty decent human being and a very talented artist, was largely kidding when he said this.

Well, not kidding kidding, because he stayed in that apartment for several years, but he got that it was funny. Sort of. But at the time, I didn’t see it that way. What I saw then was my life flashing before my eyes, and I knew that if I stayed in the middle of the back seat of that crappy-ass car, treading water like a fool, I was going to drown.

Some people can live quite happily with pathos. Some people are content to chase discontentment. I’m not one of them. I love big family dinners and going to bed at a reasonable hour. I like paying my bills on time. I like having the same address from one year to the next, and for that address to be the place where I actually, legally, live. I like for it to have running water.

Crazy as it sounds, I didn’t realize I wanted any of those things until I thought about what my life would be like if my Duck actually returned my ardor and asked me to share his vision with him.

Me, living illegally in a Brooklyn “space” with no heat or running water?

ME?!?!

No wonder he didn’t love me back. I was insane.

I mean, good LORD. I love Jane Austen—the BBC version. I’ve seen every episode of Friends. I can quote every line of Legally Blonde. I want to be a writer, sure, but you all know how I feel about Jack Kerouac.

I mean, I want to write shit that SELLS, man!

So I gave it up. I got out of that car, hopped on a bus, went home and proceeded to wait tables for five years and put myself through more non-art school.

Did I make the right decision? I dunno. The older I get the more I realize that all that art school crap was just the trappings of artsiness, and not art itself.  And that good artists realize that too.

And, to be fair, my Duck, who was never my Duck, is definitely a good artist.
Still, a few years ago he fell in love with a girl when he realized he "could never tell what she was thinking because she showed no emotion on her face."

Seriously?!?!

God, I NEVER had a chance with him!