Most artists probably just go to the library and look at books, or hit a museum for inspiration. I buy things.  I surf the internet looking for cool things and then I buy them.  Maybe it's a new tool.  Maybe it's new materials.  But that night, almost ten years ago, I found a website in Australia that sold butterflies.  I was amazed by the variety of colors, shapes and patterns.  I carefully selected $100 worth of bugs, then painfully put $60 of them back.  I waited three weeks until the box of dead bugs appeared in my mailbox.  And then.... nothing.  I still had no ideas, and now I had no ideas and a box of dead bugs.

I like art more than I like teaching art.  This is something that I have known my whole life.  But this weekend I said this to a group of art teachers, and the room went silent.

If today is indicative of how the rest of the year will go, it seems as though I might have a very clean house in 2018, and that said house will also  fall apart at some point in the upcoming year.

When I was in high school, I was trying to pick out an elective for the upcoming year. My mom encouraged me to take something that was useful, and would give me "real world" skills.  Typing.  I explained to my mom that this "whole computer thing" was just a "fad" and that at no point in my life did I ever plan on having a job that would require me to type anything.

By the first week of May, I felt like I was moving through mud, totally exhausted and needing summer break to arrive as quickly as possible.  I had stopped creating my own art, and instead took on the task of assigning 2,500 grades, creating awards for students who had seen a successful year, and writing referral after referral for students who suddenly began treating school like a prison yard. Yes, I had to google how to spell "shank".