[mburbank]

Infotech is to todays workforce what the assembly line was to our parents and the mills to our great grandparents.

Soul deadening jobs are tough, no doubt about it. I strongly recomend steering the mid away from loathing. Be as zen as you can. "Chop wood carry water" they say, and that can be the same with the keyboard.

Here's my suggestion. Art therapy. There are lot of crazy little kids out there (and frightening adolescents locked up in wards) and they all need to draw. It's meaningful work, helping kids who need help is highly rewarding, crazy ass kids are buckets of fun if tey are not your crazy ass kids and you get to have art supplies. I also think, in my limmited experience of you, that crazy ass kids would see you as someone they could trust. I mean that as a compliment. You would need to go back to school, and a s human services field, it pays shit. But it wouldn't crush your soul, hell, it might even fuel it.

Having given my two cents on that, here's the follow up. Be as critical as you like where it hones your skills, but the results of any individual work are unimportant. It is the body of work you produce throughout the course of your life, and the process of doing that work that is meaningful. The individual works belong to your audience. The process alone belongs to you. The only reason I've been able to work as long as I have at writting, art and performing with so little financial success is that I'm immersed in the process. Anything I get in return is gravy.

Mmmmm. Gravy.

I also hate and have failed miserably at the business/schmooze end of things. If you can find someone to do that for you (and lord knows I have not) let go of it entirely. Especially where you are a visual artist, you can get away very easily with being moddy, sullen and uncommunicative. But if you do find someone to do business for you, I strongly suggest you let go of every aspect of your work but it's creation. That inlcudes judging finished pieces worthy or unworthy. Just work.