Starting a personal curriculum
Nº 038
The day after my birthday last week, I was driving to see my parents at the nursing facility, doing 75 on the freeway, late as usual, with “A Means to an End” by Joy Division playing at a volume that would concern a medical professional. My mind was doing what it always does when I drive: everything except focusing on the road.
I had been thinking about something I came across online a few weeks back. A woman talking about building a personal curriculum. Not going back to school. Not getting a certificate. Not leveling up or whatever the people who wake up at 4 a.m. to journal about gratitude call it. Just pick three things you want to learn, give yourself a few months, and do it. No grades. No diploma. Nobody standing over your shoulder asking about your learning objectives.
When I got home from my visit, I picked three things to focus on.
The first is cooking. I eat like a man who keeps meaning to do better and then orders a Teriyaki Bowl at 9 p.m. because going to the kitchen feels like too much. I can make a few things. Eggs. Pasta. A chicken situation that works about sixty percent of the time. The plan is to learn five meals well enough to stop thinking about them. Prep on Sundays. Eat like a person with a plan instead of a person with a phone and a delivery app. This is not a culinary journey. I am not discovering my relationship with food. I just want to spend less money on things that make me feel bad, and then stop feeling bad about spending money when I do.
The second is becoming a better storyteller with my camera. I bought a workshop a while back from a photographer I admire and have not touched it. It’s been sitting in my account like a book on the nightstand you keep meaning to open. You move it to dust, put it back, feel a little guilty, and go to sleep. I don’t need to learn how to take pictures. I need to learn what I am trying to say with them. That is a different problem and a harder one.
The third is making physical art for a show in June. I have a group exhibition at MEDIUM with Lillian and Meredith, and I want to walk in with something I made by hand. Not files sent to a lab. Not inkjet prints. I want to work with an old photographic process that turns everything blue. Deep, strange, archival blue. The kind of blue that looks like it was pulled from another century. I want to mix the chemistry, coat the paper, stand over it in the sun, and wash it in water. I want to make something I can’t undo with a keystroke.
None of this will improve my career. Nobody is going to promote me because I can make ramen and print cyanotypes. I am not building toward anything that fits on a LinkedIn profile, which is fine because I haven’t looked at my LinkedIn profile in years and doubt that I ever will.
The real reason this idea grabbed me is simpler than all of that. I am fifty-five. I spend my days running things, fixing things, and keeping things from falling apart. The gallery, the newspapers, this newsletter, and whatever else lands on the pile by noon. Most of my week is maintenance. Necessary, sometimes rewarding, but maintenance. The curriculum is the opposite. It’s not keeping something running. It is starting something I don’t know how to finish.
cp out.