About a week ago I went through the preferences and settings for Microsoft Word X and turned just about everything off. This was spurred by a friend of mine showing what Word looked like after all the “extras” are turned off. Word actually feels nimble again. It’s light and there is not a bunch of crap in the way. I don’t have the problem of it trying to “help” me with formatting. Just a window… That is all is needed.

And now for something completely different…

I don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore. I know I want to create, but it is the “what” and “how” that has me stumped. It’s not a matter of how difficult something is or how long it would take me to get there. The problem is, I have no idea which direction I want to go in. I have too many interests and desires for my own good.

I’d like to create art… that much I know. Painter perhaps? Fine Artist? I have done this kind of thing on many occasions in my spare time for hours, if not days, on end.

I like to cook and enjoy fine food & wine. Chef? When I am in the mood I truly enjoy cooking. The one exception is when I am tired. If I am very tired when I get home, I do not like to cook.

I truly love to paint and model miniatures. I like to sculpt real things as well as fantastic objects. That mostly relates to the Fine Artist aspect, above. I’d like to keep this as a sort of Hobby, though. I very much enjoy modeling miniatures. On the other hand, confectionary artists do dabble in this sort of stuff, too. And it’s edible!

Animation and three-dimensional modeling is a very old interest of mine. It is sort of related to all of the above, with the exception of cooking. Again, I have spent days working on projects in a couple, now antiquated, three-dimensional modeling & animation packages. With the exception of dealing with software crashes, and trying to recover from them, I have enjoyed doing that kind of work very much for myself.

I have been building web sites for what seems like ages now and I have never truly enjoyed hit. I have been doing it for over seven years now and it is getting tiresome. It not that I hate doing it, I just dislike staring at code all day. I am an extremely visual person. Code is not a very visually stimulating thing to do all day for 5+ days a week.

In my work, I get almost no option to do any visually creative design and it drives me crazy. I need to make a choice. What can I or should I do?

I need something that stimulates me visually. Everything I mentioned above, with the exception of the web work, seems exciting to me. I truly love to paint and model miniatures. The problem with that is, it does not pay well (if at all). I cannot justify doing miniature work for a living as it simple can not and would not pay well enough to allow me to afford my current lifestyle. It simply can’t be done. I also enjoy computers to a degree, and miniatures are in the exact opposite spectrum of things. That in itself lends it to being a perfect stress relief at times.

Looking over what I have mentioned above, I think I can safely eliminate Cooking and Miniature work from my possible professional choices. If I’m too tired, cooking is nothing but a downer. I like making Miniatures, but there is simply not enough pay for that kind of work and I would cut out digital art in the process. That leaves me to Fine Art and Computer Animation. Potentially, these could go hand-in-hand.

Now I need to make a decision. Do I complete the few obligations that I have and go full bore into learning some of the 3D software that I have, or do I keep plugging away at what I am doing now and continue to be unhappy? I think it is pretty cut & dry.