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Monday 12 Nano-vember
2001
I have applied for a TAFE course for next
year. It's called Screen Print Design which the ever gorgeous
Ms Pea put me on to the day we first met. When I first found
out about the course I was wrapped. The list of subjects are
definitely enticing: Life Drawing, Contemporary Art and Design,
Small Business Practice (which would be really useful -- especially
with all this gst stuff that is not going to go away) Fibres
and Fabrics, Fabric Dyeing, Complex Cloth and Papermaking,
Photography, Design for Pattern Repeat, Historical Design
and Pattern Repeat plus a whole stack of screen print classes
such as Screen Printing on Paper and Hard Surfaces and Screen
Printing Textiles. It sounds great.
At the end of this month I have to attend
a three hour information session (Which is surely a
lot of information) and submit my folio (consisting of "a
few pieces of your best work") for assessment. This,
from the sounds of things, goes on behind closed doors by
people who peer over half-moon glasses while we sit in a room
listening to the same stuff we listened to at Open Day. This
makes me a little nervous. I was hoping to have an actual
interview where I got to present my work to a panel, talk
about it and attempt to charm them with comfortable laughter
and grown-up confidence etc. It would have also given me the
opportunity to explain why it is that I have dropped out of
so many other courses - arts at Monash and art teaching at
Melbourne for a start. I have good, vocational reasons for
doing so, but on an application form where you have to list
previous courses and then tick yes or no as to whether or
not you have finished them, a long list of no's doesn't look
too hot.
Add to this the fact that I rang the department
a week ago to correct my contact details which they had stuffed
up and the woman on the other end of the line was quite rude
to me for no good reason. So I got flustered and tried to
lighten the situation by making a BAD joke which fell very,
very flat and the whole thing was awful and embarrassing.
Her: Let me just open my database. Are
you a new student?
Me: Err, no. I have only just applied.
Her: (slight pause, and then in a voice that I can only call
"shitty") The answer you just gave me was totally
confused. I asked you if you are a new student and you told
me no, but then you told me that you have infact just applied.
Me: (realising that she means "new student" as in
a person who has applied to the course but has not necessarily
got in yet, which still makes no sense to me whatsoever) Oh!
(then makes bad joke which is too embarassing to reprint here.)
Her: Right.
Me: Ummm, I am a new student, yes.
So now I am thinking that maybe I don't
actually want to do the course at all. But I can't work out
if I really don't want to do the course or if I am looking
for good excuses not to want to do the course because I am
actually afraid of going through with it in a kind of self-sabotaging
way... afraid of success, afraid of failure.
These are the conflicts I go through having
read that damn self
help book.
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