Putting off

DW can tell you: I’m a procrastinator. I prefer “tangentially distracted.” Sounds better, even though it would be easy to write it up as TDS, Tangent Distraction Syndrome. Ah, I do myself a disservice. I get busy with other things. For instance, I handed over “RawCan” today. (More on that as the show date nears.)

So, we didn’t have the omelets planned for Tuesday until this evening. Three more eggs from the girls this morning drove home the point that eggs must be used NOW. Shall I tell you how I prepared them? DW: black olives, red onions, spinach and pecorino cheese. Mine: mole´ sausage, black olives, red onions and cheddar. Multi-grain toast on the side. Brunch at 2000 hours.

Wolynski inquired about the taste of duck eggs, and if it differed from chicken eggs. I would have to say they taste very similar, although others would say that they have more of a sulfur taste. I don’t know where those people acquired their eggs. Yet, where one gets one’s eggs will make a difference, to be sure. If you buy eggs in the grocery store, chances are they will not taste like eggs from chickens or ducks that range about all day in a field of seeds, bugs and slugs. Nor do store-bought eggs have the same texture. Their albumen and yolks are runny, while our eggs have some heft and bulk. So much so that one has to crack the shell with a good whack from a knife and then practically scrape out the whites. If I remember correctly, Wolynski, and a fair number of my rurally raised readers know what I’m talking about anyway, so let’s move on.

Dinner done, my intended activity for the evening was to work on a job application that is due early next week. A teaching job. To be specific, a tenure-track professorship at a Portland university. But I had been away for the greater part of today, and checking email led to blogs and a social site, and back to blogs, and the next thing I know I am writing “I am writing.”

I have written elsewhere in these pages that I would give my eye teeth for a teaching position. I would. I would give something. Maybe not teeth; but without dental coverage on the horizon, who knows?

I digress. Avoid.

See, the thing is that I may not be qualified to teach because I have very little teaching experience, per se. I can only claim teaching assistantships for both of my Masters programs and a semester teaching an art theory class nine years ago. Not much at all. But teaching isn’t everything when art programs consider someone for a position. They also look at exhibition records and publications. Again, not much of either, at least in the last six years. Farming will do that. How about other skills? Well, I owned and ran a critically successful gallery in Chicago for a couple years, and some of the younger artists I exhibited remarked that I would make a great teacher. And lord knows, art students are interested in the machinations of the gallery world.  Enough of a selling point? Again, who knows?

So, here I sit. And if I continue sitting here worrying about whether or not what I have to offer is adequate, the only thing that is going to happen for sure is I’ll get older. (Maybe another drawback: my age.) And even though I have applied for dozens of similar positions (My letters of reference are seven years old! LOL) without so much as a phone interview, over the next few days I’m going to piece together an artist’s statement, cover letter, teaching philosophy, dig up those old letters of reference, select twenty images of my recent work, and send the damn thing. I would make one helluva good teacher. Given half a chance, I’ll prove it.

Wish me luck. Not with getting the job, but getting the package together on time. First things first.