I'm effectively done with my first and only Art class. It was excruciating. I hated nearly everything about it. But fuckin' hell you throw a grid on a photo and flip it upside down and any monkey can render it in fuckin' charcoal. This class drove out of me any notions of doing some sort of certificate program. No, fuck you I'm not doing InDesign at your shitty college. No fuck you I'm not doing art fucking history at your shitty college. No fuck you I'm not studying "art business" at your shitty college because the swap meets are awash in the detritus of your failed students. I'm doing my jewelry shit and that's it. You know why everyone thinks college kids are babies these days? Because we treat them like babies. Fuckin' massages in the hallways during finals week. Free pizza and tutors until 2am in the library. Call this number if you need a friend. Call that number if you need help lifting a box. Here we're throwing you another prom. Is it guilt over having to hang active shooter instructional protocols all over the goddamn place? Is it because your response to this jackass yelling with a megaphone at the muslim student club is an easel talking about free speech zones? "Sorry kids we fucked it all up here's a coupon for $2 off an espresso?" There's a guy trying to sell me a pen machine. It does guilloche a dozen pens at a time. It used to belong to Cartier. It costs more than a Toyota Yaris. One of the very pens it made back in the '90s is on eBay right now for $2300. Ain't nobody gonna buy pens from me for $2300. But they might buy 'em for more than $23. My MasterCAM rig came yesterday. 17" 4k 6-core Xeon Quadro P3200. It weighs less than the 13" Thinkpad I used to do CAD on back in '07. Now I gotta figure out if I can make it talk to a 24-year-old French CNC machine that runs single-phase 220. 26 credits makes you so very, very tired.
You know, I don't think I do. The short answer is I intend to start a luxury brand - where "luxury" means "thinks you don't need" not "things you can't afford." The slightly longer answer is that I want to make watches but if you're going to make watches (and do it right) you end up with the kit and expertise to do a bunch of other stuff. So I'm envisioning something kind of like Montblanc, but not nearly so masculine. Maybe more like a smaller, much cheaper Cartier, although neither of those examples are anywhere near my style. 100% American made, small production stuff. Watches, writing instruments, money clips, women's jewelry, whatever else an intrepid metalsmith with a bunch of CNC machinery and a penchant for well-engineered metal goods can turn out at a profit.
Typical semester degree is 120 credit hours, right? Typical quarter degree is 180. Across 4 years that's 12 quarters is fifteen credits per quarter. 120 credit hours across 4 years is 8 semesters is also fifteen credits per quarter. 26 credits is 16 credits (full load) at one school and 10 credits (2/3rds load) at another school with a 30-minute commute between the two. it isn't quite two semesters at once but it's close. 30 credits a quarter is two semesters at once. And I've done that. And my wife made a habit of it. And it still took her five years.
If it's a real class it's fairly fucking insane. Fortunately this was 26 credits of votech so it's mostly just time consuming. But it hasn't been atypical to drive 45 minutes, spend 5hours on my feet operating a CNC mill, drive half an hour, spend 3 hours on my feet using a jeweler's torch, drive 45 minutes, make dinner for the family and then spend 3 hours hunched over a workbench disassembling and reassembling a pocketwatch.