Must. Gesso. Until. Peaceful.
Must. Not. Kill. Academician.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
In college, I tried really, really, really hard not to jump on the "Professors Are Out of Touch With Reality" bandwagon. Maybe it was because I started out in a community college before moving on to the university, I don't know. Community college tends to be more closely connected to reality than other examples of higher education. (I said "tends to be"...it ain't always.)
Anyway...I could see where spending your whole life in the hallowed halls of academe could give one a somewhat skewed view of the real world, but I tried not to spew that "those who can't do, teach" crap.
However, there comes a time -- and for me, that time is now -- that one starts to take a good, hard look at stereotypes and think that maybe there's a damn good reason they exist.
I won't go into detail, but the Cliff Notes version of the whole story is that my sweetie is trying to sign up for a class with Metro State. He's been working like mad for the past week to get all his ducks in a row, getting Metro and his former university to play nice with one another and move things along. (The deadline for registration for this class is today.) So...Metro accepts him as a student. Ex-university accepts the class in question as "okey-dokey" for his degree. The savings account will just cover the tuition and fees. The professor...won't accept him into the class. Nope, sorry, you haven't satisfactorily fulfilled the prerequisites. Never mind that he's got over FIVE YEARS of professional experience doing exactly what this class is about. Never mind that he's finished every technical class related to his degree, including others on this subject.
Can he get into the prereq class? Who knows? Professor Asshat didn't bother to address that. (Sign #1 that the guy doesn't work in the real world...in a business situation, that information would have been automatically included. Okay, it would have been automatically included if I had been the one answering the question. Reason? No, not because I'm committed to going above and beyond. Because it saves me time later!)
So. I'm going to get out one of my new canvases. I'm going to get out my bucket o'gesso. I'm going to turn myself over to the rhythmic back and forth of the brush. I'm going to forget about that guy.
And then, when that doesn't work, I'm going to make my sweetie give me the guy's name so I can sneak over to his house and leave him a flaming bag of cat turds on his front step.
