I had weird dreams last night.
I dreamed that I was talking to a friend from way back in my past, who for some reason was a policeman and was telling him not to move to Dallas, trying to explain why it would be a horrible thing, and why he should just stick around Chicago because we would soon be having cool loft parties.
I explained this under the premise that I had once lived in Texas and knew how truly evil it was, and that he should not, under any circumstance, move there.
Now, this friend of mine happened to be someone I knew while I was in Texas, and near as I can tell, has never actually set foot in Chicago, so that makes the dream especially odd. The fact that he was a cop made it even more unusual, since said friend was actually something of a (former?) speed freak. I was a cop, too, but I planned on quitting because I didn't want to work any job that made me wear a uniform.
Weird.
Now, I need to clarify something I wrote before.
In my last entry I talked about how I had previously considered going into the field of art therapy and mentioned about how I almost went to school for it. I mentioned a school, Alverno College, in Milwaukee. One might assume this meant I was thinking of moving back to Milwaukee.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
Milwaukee is an evil town.
Well...it's prettier than here. And it has a lot more to do than here, and better shops and restaurants than here.
But...
It's in Wisconsin. The only real purpose of Milwaukee is to work in a beer bottling plant and hang otu with Lenny and Squiggy. And let's face it, that's not going to happen. And without that, I'm left to the white trash wife beaters, the hordes of crazy, elderly swedish women, and the many,many,many wanna be goths and wanna be filmmakers living in some relative's basement.
Plus, as I learned when I attended Alverno's orientation, a school filled with only women is just damned creepy. I tend to get along much better with men than women anyways, so the idea of moving to Wisconsin to go to an all womens' school (despite the suspiria-esque implications therein) borders on the inconceivable.
So worry not. I have every intention of moving back to Chicago.
I am in the process of trying to decide if art therapy is a "doggy daycare" scenario.
What is doggy daycare, you ask? Besides, that is, a place where people find babysitters for their dogs while they're at work? Why, it's an analogy. It's an analogy for things in life that are much more appealing as ideas than in actuality.
I took a job in a doggy daycare facility the day before my twenty ninth birthday. I was very excited. I mean, dogs are cute. What could be better than getting paid to play with them all day long? So what if it was only eight bucks an hour. The work would be rewarding, right? Wrong!
My first day, she had me work for ten hours straight. Most of my work could be divided into three categories: cleaning up the dogs poop when they went inside (and most of these dogs did go inside, instead of at their hourly breaks outside) spraying as much dog poop as possible off the enclosed cement lot outside where they went and yelling at the dogs to not bark because the business owner was worried about her Lincoln Park neighbors complaining and getting her shut down.
Occasionally, a small dog would curl up on my lap. This would be adorable for all of three minutes, until the other dogs would take notice and next thing you know, I have three german shepherds also trying to jump up in my lap. Ideally, there were two people working at all times. But, the guy who worked with me wouldn't so much as pet the other dogs and while I was continuously cleaning up dog shit, he was watching Jenny Jones. In fact, that's all he did all day, was watch Jenny Jones and Oprah.
Well, after ten solid hours of this, I realized I'd had quite enough. The next day, I woke up and had to make a choice: spend a relaxing day, celebrating my birthday or go clean dog shit for another ten hours. Guess which I decided to do?
At that point, I learned that there are some things in life that sound like the coolest job in the world but when you do them, you're just scrubbing off shit for a meager wage.
So, I am asking myself that question about art therapy. It could be very rewarding, helping children (and adults in some sort of rehabilitation program) overcome trauma through art. Every day I could go to work, find some child who has been abused or neglected or seen a loved one die, and I could use art to help them work through it.
But on the downside, every day I would go to work and work with children who had been abused or neglected or seen a loved one die. That's pretty depressing stuff. The question that begs is, would this be rewarding or just drive me to drink?
There's also the matter of finding the work. It is a highly specialized field, and I'm not sure where I'd even look for jobs like that. I suppose I could work in schools and clinics, but I haven't been able to get even the vaguest idea of how many jobs there are available in this area. The money is not great, it taps out around $40,000 and requires a fairly significant amount of training. That of course, means a lot of loans. An entry level position can come start as low as $20,000 a year but the monthly payments on loans can easily be as much as $500. a month.
So it opens up the question of whether this is something that I think I can do and if so, is it worth the long term sacrifice? The problem with doggy day care is that you never know if it's what you want to do until you're in the thick of it. You can think something is going to be like doggy day care and it can wind up being your dream job. You can also think something is the most rewarding job that you could ever hope to have, only to find that you're picking up shit.
Obviously, more research is needed to be done to further assess this. It doesn't mean any drastic change of plans, however, just a course of action that I can change direction if necessary with minimal repurcussions...