Freakshow
Step up, step right up! See the man what has no corpus callosum!
Yeah, I feel like a circus freak a lot of the time. People pigeon hole you as being either "left" brained or "right" brained. It's OK to be decent at math and science, but not if you're also involved in the arts. To do both truly mystifies people.
To make matters worse, I find that I often end up on one side of the proverbial brain division or the other. In college I started as an engineering student who perplexed the other engineering students by painting. Then I switched to design and perplexed people by screwing the stereotype that someone in the arts sucked at math and science. And ever since I've gotten out I've bounced from one extreme to the other.
The problem is integration.
As I've been doing the scientific illustration/advertising lately I'm discovering that I'm Ok at working in a "logical/scientific/computer science" frame of mind or a "holistic/artistic/synthesis" frame of mind. But I suck at integrating the two sides. I often feel like one of those epilepsy patients who's had a radical corpus callosectomy, where they cut the connecting fibers between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. The result has weird effects. A patient of the surgery who closes his left eye can identify that an orange is round but can't find the word for it because those two pieces of information are stored in different hemispheres. The wierdest side effect is a thing called "Alien Hand Syndrome". Look it up. It's out there. One hand literally seems to have a life of it's own. Totally X-Files.
The thing I'm working on right now is how to combine the creative side with the research side, and it's tough work. And hey, it's better than competing for the few database programming jobs that will inevitably go to India anyway or working in hosting and ultimately rebooting boxes that are owned by spammers with an attitude.
Yeah, I feel like a circus freak a lot of the time. People pigeon hole you as being either "left" brained or "right" brained. It's OK to be decent at math and science, but not if you're also involved in the arts. To do both truly mystifies people.
To make matters worse, I find that I often end up on one side of the proverbial brain division or the other. In college I started as an engineering student who perplexed the other engineering students by painting. Then I switched to design and perplexed people by screwing the stereotype that someone in the arts sucked at math and science. And ever since I've gotten out I've bounced from one extreme to the other.
The problem is integration.
As I've been doing the scientific illustration/advertising lately I'm discovering that I'm Ok at working in a "logical/scientific/computer science" frame of mind or a "holistic/artistic/synthesis" frame of mind. But I suck at integrating the two sides. I often feel like one of those epilepsy patients who's had a radical corpus callosectomy, where they cut the connecting fibers between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. The result has weird effects. A patient of the surgery who closes his left eye can identify that an orange is round but can't find the word for it because those two pieces of information are stored in different hemispheres. The wierdest side effect is a thing called "Alien Hand Syndrome". Look it up. It's out there. One hand literally seems to have a life of it's own. Totally X-Files.
The thing I'm working on right now is how to combine the creative side with the research side, and it's tough work. And hey, it's better than competing for the few database programming jobs that will inevitably go to India anyway or working in hosting and ultimately rebooting boxes that are owned by spammers with an attitude.