Identification

While I was changing out of my Tyvek suit in the animal facility changing room this morning, I spent some time looking at my work ID. It was taken my first day of work, and I look really unbelievably terrible. The right side of my face was swollen because I had a wisdom tooth infection and I was dressed really awkwardly. Awkwardly normal. I was wearing a red cashmere sweater that R's sister had given me for Christmas the year before. And Khakis. I was in costume essentially. In the picture, I was trying to smile one of the big, beaming smiles I had been collecting on ID cards for years, but because of my swollen jaw, and in a bizarre attempt to straddle between propriety and sarcasm, I just look really uncomfortable.


I started working in the lab on the 6th of January, 2003. Back then I thought it was possible to live a dual existence - to have your job, your public persona and stacked on top of that your real life. While I was in the oh-so-delicate process of applying for the job (I'll have to get into that some other time), one of the selling points that my dad had given me was that I could still have all the time in the world I needed to work on my artwork - well, all the time in the world after 5pm. And it made sense, because really, what else would there be to do, and it wasn't like I was being particularly prolific in Ocean Grove. But when you work for my dad, its hard to treat your job like any other shift. It becomes your life. And his job had been a part of my life since I was a kid. Only now it was mine too. The more complicated thing about working for my dad, was justifying the fact that I had even been hired. (This is still complicated, but I care much, much less now) I was wholly and completely unqualified. No question about it, no maybes. I was a year out of school, and since then had done nothing really than work in a vintage kitchen store by the ocean, and fret about my future as an artist. So I worked late so I could get the overtime (because it turned out with those pesky taxes I was making less than I was at the vintage store), didn't take lunch, and I didn't joke much. Not so much because I was so serious about the job, but because I needed to prove that I deserved to be there as much as any other person there with a science degree and whose last name wasn't the same as the boss's. I felt that as long as I convince the people I worked with that I wasn't just hired because I am the P.I.'s (Principal Investigator) kid, my little self deceit would be defensible. That as long as I was convincing, it wouldn't matter that my real interests were on hold, because after all this was research.
And I was convincing, so convincing that I managed to believe it for a while. I registered for science classes, under the premise that I was going to go back to school and get a second bachelors degree so I could eventually get a masters in biology. I had every intention of doing so. But even as deluded as I was, I recognized that this would never, could never be the REAL goal. I was still artist. Whatever the hell that means.

Two and a half years later the same picture is still on my ID, along with my original title - Technical Aide. I am still not working (on my art) nearly enough, although what has changed in recent months is that it doesn't bother me so much any more. And really, thats why I started working in the lab in the first place - because I was totally disillusioned with art. Only then I thought I could rescue it from itself. Now, I think I am happy to let it be what it is. The new problem is figuring what the hell to do next.