How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer

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Anna met up with her friend Mariah, at Prodigia, the arts co-op where she was taking classes.

"My life right now, it's like a string of random events, you know?" said Anna. "I produce a design for a client. At some other point, Mera and I go to a bar. At some other point, I learn something interesting from an artist at Prodigia ... "

"Is that so bad?" asked Mariah.

" ... or sometimes I talk with you."

"Oh! That does sound bad."

"Stop it!" Anna grinned at Mariah's wit. "What I mean is, it all seems so random. My life has no direction."

"That's how my life was when I was in my early twenties," said Mariah. "I think it's that way for everyone. You do some work. You go to parties. You have fun, when possible. The days go by. It's as if time isn't passing, or at the very least, time has no meaning. You wonder if it's supposed to add up to something."

"No, I'm not sure you get it," said Anna, looking around at the other people. "I like it here, but this is just part of what I was referring to earlier. Feeling random. Feeling undirected. This is just one more random experience that I'm having."

"Speaking from my own experience," offered Mariah, "and of other lives I've read about, I suspect that feeling will fade. Years from now you'll look back and all of these events will seem connected, a web of events, a braid, a net, a trampoline, it bounces you upwards. Maybe I'm all wrong, but I think, at a certain point, it all starts to seem connected and important."

"Ha!" Anna scoffed. "Important?" She held up the simple sketch she'd been doing of the turtle. "Important?" she asked Mariah again.

"Important," Mariah responded. She was overly serious, like always. "How do you think it all works, the life of an artist? The career of an artist? Every creative career tends to be unique; you don't know what will spark it. You could be sitting in a cafe sipping coffee, and the guy at the table next to you talks about how much he hates toothpaste, and you want to defend toothpaste, so ... "

"I love toothpaste," protested Anna. "Who is this monster?"

" ... so you get serious about defending toothpaste," Mariah was stubborn about finishing her sentence before explaining, "He's fictional. Obviously. I just invented him as an example."

"Does anyone dislike toothpaste?" Anna sounded worried, but Mariah understood she was making fun of the example. Mariah refused to engage at the comical level that Anna was initiating.

"Or you watch some people dance," Mariah was determined to find an example that Anna would respect. "And you feel like art has failed to catch the reality of frenzied motion, yet you love dancing ... "

"People actually pay me for Shaku Shaku lessons," said Anna, who was terrible at dancing, but who was still trying to get Mariah to smile. Mariah refused.

" ... so you decide to create a new visual vocabulary to capture some essential truth of the visuals of dance," Mariah went on stubbornly to the end, wanting Anna to acknowledge these words as profound. "Artists are sensitive to the influence of their environment, they inhale the whiff of new aesthetics the way ... " She was reaching for something so profound that Anna would not be able to tease, but instead she fell into the trap of giving Anna a metaphor full of obvious humor: " ... the way dogs sniff the infinite subtle smells in the air. Oh, damn."

........

How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer is a comedy that follows as Anna as she goes from being a creative teenager to being a successful creative professional in her twenties. Along the way, Anna encounters artists of every kind, each of whom gives her some insight into the difference between being creative versus being a creative professional.