the menagerie

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

02: Sidestep

If you asked me, I would tell you that I'm not good at art. I realize this is a subjective qualification, but we insert here Ira Glass's commentary about taste versus skill as an explanation, and then we spin backward in time to my childhood again.

You see, art is and is not part of the core curriculum of my schooling. There's plenty of art and craft time, yes. Much of it works on a principle of following a set of directions to produce something that looks like the example, and that's not something that works for tiny me, because I either get very invested in trying to make my version look exactly like the example, or I get sufficiently frustrated at not being able to do this that I stop caring about whether what I'm doing is within tolerance of the example, and that is only going to create greater difficulties down the road.

The bigger problem, of course with visual and other arts, is that we come into the world with plentiful examples of things that are high quality and good taste, and we do not have any kind of advantage conferred with experience, genetic memory, or other such things where being the descendants of other people provide us with obvious advantages in the creation of art.

That said, it's a remarkable feat of every human that they manage to figure out what sounds (or gestures) are the important ones, and what combinations result in intelligible conversation or getting things that are desired. Which happens after a very long amount of practice absorbing those things and eventually experimenting with them until the right combinations come into existence. And then, just to up the difficulty, after we've mastered the art of communication by sound or gesture, we introduce younglings to squiggles (or bumps to be felt), where squiggles or bumps of certain forms represent the sounds that have already been learned, and the combination of squiggles or bumps in the correct order and style allow us to convey those sounds and meanings to other people who know how to interpret the squiggles as sounds and words. Babies and children accomplish an impressive feat of art by gaining both of those proficiencies by themselves, and they do it through a boatload of observation and practice.

Yet, with babies, we seem to be encouraging and accepting of the amount of time that it takes for them to gain the proficiency needed in communication, both lexical and auditory. As we get older, there's not always as much support for collecting new skills, or patience for the necessary practice of them, either from ourselves, or from the people around us that could fill that role. By third grade, I could make a smiley, or perhaps something of cartoonish proportions and the feel that you get from those childhood drawings on the refrigerator, and a friend of mine could make detailed drawings of superhero action sequences. That friend did a lot more drawing practice than I was doing, because I was more interested at the time in exercising my reflexes and my puzzle-solving abilities, and learning how to play strategically at board games and card games. But rather than framing this as a choice of "I have chosen to allocate my time differently," I instead absorbed the message "I'm not that good at art."

While I've played a musical instrument from grade five all the way through my undergraduate university experience, and a little bit beyond that (including gigs that I got paid for playing that instrument in a band), I have not considered myself much more than an untalented amateur at the instrument. I can hear what others are doing, and how much more refined their tone and ability is, and I do not have that. My taste exceeds my ability, and I have probably made as much progress as I can at this point without perhaps some additional instruction to improve further, or significant practice devoted to the instrument. That said, I'm not putting my time and energy into that particular pursuit at this time. Mostly because there's still a highly communicable disease going about, and playing instrumental music where you have to move air through the instrument makes it very difficult for you to mask or otherwise take precautions against infection from other people who are also outputting a lot of air. Also because the group I was playing with at a local college became a group where the community members needed to pay for continuing education credits, rather than volunteering themselves, and that's not happening. Again, I am choosing to put my time and energy elsewhere at this point.

The Geocities site I created as an exercise in learning HTML never became anything other than a personal site for learning HTML with. Perhaps I had some hope somewhere that it would become something and people would visit, but it was never a developed enough hope for me to try changing things to turn it into a website for others. I still have no great ambitions of creating a website that everyone wants to visit and see everything about. When I learn programming and scripting languages, it's usually to accomplish some project that I have in mind, or, in a very recent case, to get better at playing a game. (It's a powerful motivator, what can I say?)

When webcomics were the thing everyone was doing, I ran a comic for several years on a lark. And in that comic, I mostly leaned into the idea of the drawings being simple and crude and trying to let the writing carry things. It never became a great popular thing. It was something I did because I wanted to do it, and while the fame and fortune would have been nice, I didn't expect it to happen. Randall Munroe proved that you don't necessarily have to have intricately detailed drawings to have something that's funny and enjoyable. So did Ryan North. But I did the thing I wanted to do, and it was enjoyable, and then my life fell apart sufficiently that I couldn't keep up with it. I'd have to do a fair amount of resetting passwords and the like if I wanted to revive it, but I always could. I'm sure there are more jokes hiding somewhere, and more stories to be told from that space.

Writing and essaying is one of the spots where I can admit to long practice at the skill, although if my goal is set at creating the Great American Novel, then clearly I'm not good at that, either. But I am certainly practiced at many forms of writing. Mostly essay, a lot of fanfiction. Any success that I have in fanfiction kudos and comments is, for me, attributable to the size of the fandom that I wrote the work in, rather than something that specifically I created that has people wanting to read it. Although I do have some user subscriptions and some regulars in the kudos columns, so there's something there.

What really bowled me over, though, was that while my numbers have never been great in terms of kudos or comments, someone else mentioned, when I took a look at their book club readings, that they were impressed with my having done my book club readings for thirteen years. Which is true. I have been doing weekly posts on things that I'm reading for that long, usually with a spork firmly in hand and at the ready. I ran the entire gamut of the Dragonriders of Pern (at least until some new Pern novel comes out) and that's a great accomplishment that I didn't really think I would finish when I set out on it. But I kept doing it, and eventually I went all the away through. It turned out to be a matter of persistence rather than any kind of extra-powerful talent or any external motivator from fans to keep things going. And I sit in sufficiently relative privilege that I don't have to beg for dollars in each of my posts, or set them behind paywalls so that I make income off my writing, having amassed a large amount of people following me for my writing. I have probably amassed at least a million words of my own writing, over these topics, and the book club posts, and some things that I have had published in real publications, in my professional life. (I am, in fact, a published author several times over. Just not of the Great American Novel.) The point of much of my writing is that I enjoy doing it, and when I stop enjoying it, I'll stop doing it and do something else.

In the last year or two, I've taken up trying to mimic other people's drawings with my own hand, using the medium of dry-erase markers on a whiteboard. Some efforts turn out better than others. There are compliments about the drawings, which I mostly want to deflect away, because it's not like I created this drawing by drawing what was in my head onto the whiteboard. I tried to draw what I saw, and sometimes I succeeded. (Whiteboard is a very forgiving medium for certain types of mistakes.) I'm likely improving at this through the practice, which is nice, but I'm mostly doing it because I want to do it, and because nobody else has yet told me that I'm forbidden from doing it. I think it makes a nice decoration for the programming offerings. There are compliments. I have not yet figured out how to phrase an answer to the questions "Who drew this?" or "Did you draw this?" that conveys both that what you see is an attempt at copying what someone else has already done, and that yes, I did make the marks on the whiteboard for this. If there is something praiseworthy about the endeavor, it's in accuracy of replication, in the thing looking enough like the original to be recognizable. It's not "I drew the thing in my head," because when I try to do that, it doesn't turn out like what I envisioned in my head. So I need more practice, and possibly more instruction. But the same rule applies to this as does to the writing parts: if I stop enjoying it, I'll stop doing it.

This rule is, in fact, the secret to me getting me to do the things that I'm doing. If I start thinking about monetization or professionalism or growing the readership or other such things, I'll start having greater amounts of anxiety for chasing a goal that I may never get anywhere close to. So long as I can believe that the things I'm doing are most for me, or mostly for the practice that I'll get out of doing them, then I can go forward with making the attempt. I have to avoid thinking it has to be perfect, because if it has to be perfect, that taps into an entire well of trauma and terrible feelings that generally ends with "if I can't make it perfectly, I won't make it at all." And because I'm doing it because I think the idea is funny, or because I want the practice, or because I've learned some new technique and I wanted to make something that put it to use, I can sidestep the idea that it has to be perfect, and therefore bring it into existence.

This rule also permits me to deflect praise for it, since "I'm copying someone else's art," or "I did it because I thought I could. An Actual Computer Toucher / Programmer / Artist / Essayist would be able to do it better than I can." There is often an immediately-deployed counterargument to this that comes in the form of "you did the thing that I am looking at, accept a compliment." The people deploying those counterarguments are often more stubborn than I am about the matter in the moment, even if I can be more stubborn about not accepting that I have practiced the skill sufficiently to make neat things in the long term.

The person who created it can see all the flaws, the person observing it can see all the strengths. Taste. Skill. And the whole thing is still subjective about whether or not something is good, and who it is good for. And whether the person doing it is any good. Because lots of people will say "That's better than I can do," and while that's a true statement, and better than "Oh I could never do that," or "I don't have any talent at that," I think the most accurate thing to say is "That's excellent. I appreciate this, and I am choosing to spend my time on other things."

And so, for now, I spend my time on things I find enjoyable.