Life is work

 Everything is work. Getting up in the morning, making coffee, brushing your teeth, showering and getting ready for the day. Then starting your day and focusing on the tasks at hand, whether you are paid for completing an assignment or just by showing up. Finding a good reason to get out of bed in the morning is not hard at all, your bladder makes that decision for you. Grogginess compels you to make coffee and hunger forces you to eat. Boredom persuades you to find something entertaining and enjoyable to do. While nature gives you the desire to find a compatible mate that fulfills lusts apatite and eventually the compulsion to procreate. The act and achievement of procreation will then mandate the need for more; more space, more disposable funding and time, but the two cancel each other. Life is work.

 Finding gratification in life while working is the hard part of life. I like to believe that there is no time limit on finding happiness in work while living life but as the years go by and one tries to find an equilibrium between happiness with life and work is hard work in of its self.

 When I worked at a job that did not make me happy I would come home and either read a Science Fiction novel or draw, mostly draw, to unwind from a crappy day at work. I would come home turn on the television for some background noise and sit at my desk and draw for hours sometimes forgetting to even eat. I loved doing this and it made me happy. I would glance up at the television every once in a while when I heard something that would catch my attention. A commercial for example: one that promoted a college in San Francisco, perhaps you've heard of it? The Academy of Art College. The ads would state that you could turn your hobby of drawing into a fulfilling career in a few short years. I decided to make a change and study what I did to make myself happy, a hobby that I used to pass time as a child that I was now using as a tool to keep myself sane while working in the restaurant industry.

 I called the school the next day to set up an appointment so that I could bring in a portfolio to show. A week later I was on my way to begin a new life as an Art Student, a chain-smoking coffee guzzling all black wearing pretentious what-ever saying Fine Art student. I quit my job and began the Fall semester six months later. I was happy, working my way towards a career that I really had no clue about until starting Art College. I was doing well the first year until, financial collapse, savings mostly gone and expenses continually increasing, oil paint is expensive. While working on a project for finals on a flimsy easel, television playing in the back ground I hear a commercial “Be All That You Can Be! and earn money for college too! The U.S. Army!” Last day of class we show our work and the instructor gives his final critiques and then shows off some of his own work. Very awesome and spectacular work we all say, but he tells us that he has been trying to get his stuff into galleries for a long time and that his just working at the Academy to pay his student loans from when he was a student there at the Academy. At the end of the semester I went into an Army recruiting office.

 I was in and out of Academy of Art College/University over a ten-year period. Juggling mandated Military Duty and Collegiate aspirations. After the first year of military duty I resumed my studies at university while remaining on active reserve status. I changed my major from Fine Arts to Computer Animation not realizing that computer hardware/software and upgrades are way more costly than oil paint. But computer tech knowledge goes a long way. Over the course of three years studying 3D/Visual effects I have come to another conclusion, that the creativeness that is used in the 3D industry is by the 3D Modeler is to model someone else's creation for their story, not your own. Your models just get you the job to model for them. That notion did not make me happy, because I want to create my own story and models. Which has brought me to my last year at the Academy of Art University where I have been taking countless writing classes.
 Work is finding what makes you happy as long as you are sure as to what makes you happy.