AMGL

My first entry for this goal a year ago, available here, listed the ways in which I was going to measure my change.

I think perhaps the most definitive change is that I have committed to art school. It’s funny—I actually submitted my first application for a scholarship to study art yesterday, so it is almost as if on the very end of the challenge I confirmed the direction in which I am going. I am more public about art school now, telling this to people when they ask me what I am going to do. I am prepping a portfolio (which is going very slow, but it is because I am realizing I can only do so much and how very true it is that, to do something well, you need to focus on that one thing) and applying to art schools in December/January.

The stress around this change, but more so, about unresolved issues with my previous way of life, affected how I handled my spiritual growth and physical well-being. Both genuinely reflect that I still have issues to slowly resolve, but it is a process. I actually want to think that these will slowly resolve up until October 2010 (the end of my Saturn return, as predicted in my birth chart. For now, it is like working through shells, coming to terms with issues of identity, habits I have used to make up for my insecurities, etc. The stress around the change might have made me unconscious of what I was doing at times, but on the whole I feel I have more awareness than what I had a few years ago.

And moving to a new place/ learning a new language? Well, there is not a connection between the new place (US, UK, or Iceland) and new language (Russian), but I am definitely taking steps towards a shift of location and using my brain differently (where Russian and art both play a role).

These are still the issues I want to have changed by this time next year.

At this time last year, I wrote that I wanted to be at a completely different stage in my life. A year has passed, and it seems to me that all this year has been an incubation period of sorts to get me to the point of conceiving and accepting an entirely different life.

While the external circumstances of my life at present still seem to be in a state of transition, I think that I now understand that I had outgrown the way of life I envisioned and planned for myself a decade ago. I guess it is only natural that it might take a full year (and even more than that) to come to terms that, as much as I was attached to certain aspects about my past self, it would involve a lot of resistance (and, ultimately, self-denial) to insist staying in that same place. It is funny how events in the last two weeks have really brought this home to me. Perhaps I do not have a completely different life right now, but I have definitely constructed a hinge point for my life to change. I literally do feel it as a hinge, where the direction of my life was bent, and can now only turn in a certain (completely different) way.

Particularly art resources—Philly has a crazy amount of stuff for artists. No joke. Some of these are:

Philadelphia Sketch Club

Plastic Club

These are two places where you can sketch for three hours for 5-9 dollars a pop. That is cheap—especially if you have a professional nude model!

Fleisher Art Memorial
I know of no other place that will give you a 75% discount on a 300 dollar professional art course. And the facilities are great.

And First Friday’s truly rock.

I really love this city.