Sometimes life isn’t content with giving you a single serving of work and obligations. Sometimes life sees it fit to heap it on until your plate is damn well near overflowing, and then life still tries to spoon on a bit more, like an insistent mother in law who is utterly convinced that you are much too skinny.

Such is my current situation.

Let me preface by making it clear that I am not complaining. And although I find myself considerably more stressed and harried than I can remember being in a long time, I can say with utter conviction that I am actually quite pleased by life’s sudden effort to inundate me.

There are consequences, of course. There are priorities to list, and I am mourning, to some degree, those hobbies that have slipped from the bottom of said list and have fallen quite out of my current reach. Such is the fate of my random deviations, which, sadly, is a pastime that I have derived a great deal of enjoyment from. Lost alongside them are rampant gaming, excessive hockey practice, and even gratuitous Family Guy watching. But, like I was saying, priorities are priorities.

So I’m afraid I will not be making any more random deviations for a while. Fortunately, the key word in this instance is “random.” This is because one of my new obligations is a full course load of work from the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I spent a couple of months compiling and creating a nice little portfolio, which they apparently judged as being sufficient for acceptance, and I am now enrolled in the graduate program for fine arts, where I am pursuing an MFA in animation and visual effects.

My two most recent submissions were for my figure illustration class, the first being for practice, and the second being an assignment. If you were curious, they apparently went over without a hitch. In addition to illustration, I also have an animation and an art history class. Hopefully I will soon have something moderately decent to submit from the animation class. I doubt I will be creating anything in the history class, though I hope it influences the overall quality of my work in general.

If a full graduate course load at a relatively demanding university were not enough, I have had the great fortune, and I mean that quite seriously and enthusiastically, of being taken under the wing of one of the top-notch engineers at my job. He had been a fan of my 3D illustration work, but has now been making a very serious and active effort to push me into doing actual mechanical engineering drawings. So in addition to learning all about art and animation, I am also learning about mechanical engineering, machining, and computer aided design (using Solidworks, to be specific).

Although giving up hobbies to focus on obligations is never easy, I can look into the future possibilities this effort will unlock and try to accept, as gracefully as I can, the current burdens I am shouldering. In the end I cannot imagine a more interesting, useful, and potentially lucrative set of skills.

Wish me luck.