The End is Near

"Some say the end is near. Some say we'll see Armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will, I sure could use a vacation from all of this..." -J.M.K.

I spent all week working on a landscape painting for my Oil Painting class. I really loved the sky I had painted. It was a beautiful blue that shifted from a darker, deep blue to a lighter, less saturated blue. It was probably the one thing I've painted so far that I've actually been happy with and proud of. Today in class my teacher gave each of us a critique of our painting, but before walking around he had us each display our paintings so we could see how everyone else in the class was doing on theirs. Everyone propped up their paintings and we all stood there gazing upon each other's handiwork. The results were amazing. There were some incredible paintings sitting before my eyes, and then there was mine...

My painting was by far the worst in the class. It was so shameful in comparison to everyone else's paintings. I wanted to run up to the chalkboard and throw myself over my efforts, shielding my classmates from the horror like a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his comrades. After a moment of silence and the realization that I am by far the worst painter in my class if not the world, we went back to our easels to work on our masterpieces, or in my case failure. My teacher made his way around and eventually got to my section. His first question was "What do you like about your painting?" It may have been an embarrassing disaster, but I was still proud of that sky, so I told him. He didn't seem to agree. He then took my paintbrush, slathered it in purple paint, and splotched it all over my beautiful blue sky. My heart sank. He explained to me why he did that and why it was a good idea, but all I could hear was the voice in my head telling me to punch him in the gut for ruining my sky. Of course a few more strokes and the painting started improving, which is why he is the teacher and I'm the mediocre student.

I came home from a long day at work looking to melt my mind away into numbness and listless splendor. Naturally the best way to accomplish something some people pay drug dealers a fortune for is to turn to Facebook. I tossed off my backpack like a high school drama queen, threw my "dead of winter" coat off onto the back of my chair, and slumped down into my chair in front of my computer like an online gaming fanatic getting ready for a raid. I had only just sat down and gotten comfortable, and watched my news feed displayed before my eyes when I heard an unmistakable clicking noise. The screen flashed into the infamous Blue Screen of Death, and with it my hopes of a low level brain functioning afternoon. I tried to reboot my computer as any youngster within sight of their heart's desire would, and to my dismay was met with utter failure. My hard drive had crashed in a manner most befitting NASCAR legends, and it wasn't coming back anytime soon.

As I finally got up the courage to close my gaping jaw, I started to realize the impact of this moment on me. All of my Illustration scans were gone, all of my personal exploration assignments for the semester were gone, all of my photos, all of my funny cat videos, all of my post-it notes littering the desktop...gone. To say that this was devastating was an understatement. Perhaps the worst aspect was the unexpected timing of the crash. I had to at least make an effort to recover so many important files, so I went off in search of a Geek, or rather a squad of geeks to see what they might have to offer. I carried my massive desktop computer into the store, nodded to the sentinel guarding the door in his blue polo shirt, and walked over to Geek Squad central. I explained to the head geek my issues and asked for a possible plan of action. He took a look and decided it was just the video card that had malfunctioned causing everything to shut down. This was good news I thought as he shuffled off to get a new card from the shelf. He installed it and everything looked good. I paid the painful 80 dollars for the card and counted myself lucky it wasn't worse. But then it got worse..

The guy with the official looking name tag ran into a snag trying to boot up my computer. It seems the hard drive had failed. This was exactly what I had already known and explained to them upon entry to the clubhouse. I'm not sure how or why they decided I needed a new video card, or why they made me pay for it when it didn't accomplish a thing. Needless to say I was disappointed, and out 80 bucks. I made a special appointment to use the "mule" to attempt to transfer my files from the failed hard drive later, since it was all tied up at the moment...there is a joke in there somewhere, a bad one. Carrying my obliterated computer out with a flashy new video card in defeat, I headed home. Hope is somewhere on the horizon, a very distant horizon surrounded by black clouds. But it is there still nonetheless.