Journey into Stuff: cartoons

Showing posts with label cartoons. Show all posts

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Potential: Still unrealised

I often look through my old cartoons to see what I can use in my blog. Today I found a few (more) ideas surrounding what seems to be the topic of my main lament: unrealised potential.

This post has come about because a few people I know have recently expressed to me their dissatisfaction with their jobs. Not always the work itself - often it has been the people, the processes or the environment.

For those who know me very well (ie. wife) - they know I've never really liked any of my real jobs. Ironically, for me it's always been about the nature of the work that's left me unsatisfied - the people have usually been a positive (sometimes the only one).

My jobs have all essentially been about paying the bills. I've never been able to hit that sweet spot of enjoyable job that actually pays okay.

The problems start early - when at the ripe old age of 16 we're asked to "choose" possible careers...

And everyone's different. Accounting at the time was not for me. I know people that absolutely love it - they get excited by it. Freaks you say? Weirdo's? Good on them I say.

Obviously, I've tried to make a career from artistic endeavours, but that's proven a difficult beast - and in reality - whilst we all see the success stories they are like the tip of an iceberg. The rest of us (and there's a lot of us) are underwater and not able to make any sort of living from those pursuits.

This hit home to me the other week when I was at a writing seminar. One of the statistics given was that the average Australian Author earned about $10,000 per annum (these are published authors and considered successful in a publishing sense). I've spent two years on my current book - at nights after work and on the weekends. I probably work harder than most - for $10,000 pa that seems a bit stupid - and yet I still do it.

Whilst culture and art is really important, and we all want books, movies and music, etc I don't think the world is willing to pay much (or anything) for them. Plus there's always the middlemen who make more money from your product than you do. That's why I like this digital age - no middlemen are making any money from my blog! We'll gloss over the fact that neither am I... and you'd have to agree - this stuff is GOLD people - GOLD!

So, it's actually a lot easier to go to work everyday in whatever job it is you do and pick up a pay check (or Electronic Funds Transfer). Still, it's a big plus if you actually enjoy the work you do.

My favourite job was when I was in my early 20's. Just finished Uni - in a recession and unemployed - I got a 'very' part-time job working as the equipment manager at the local State athletics centre.

The centre was very run-down (now demolished) and on competition days I had to drive this really old wreck of a car around the track to set up things like the hurdles, high-jump, etc. The car was an absolute rust-bucket and had obviously been vandalised many times. The (very) old guy I was taking over from, told me to take out the distributor cap and battery every time I left so that the hoons wouldn't be able to start the car up and do bog laps around the track.

It's weird how age changes you. That athletics job has less appeal to me now than accounting. Maybe my parent's were right when they told me to finish that accounting degree - except for the fact they were right 20 years late.

I'm still aiming for that job that both earns enough to pay the bills with a little left over, and I enjoy. If everyone had that - whatever that job happened to be for them - we'd all be in a much better space.

And for those of us, like myself, who don't yet have it - I leave you with this final (timeless) message...

Journey into Stuff by Jeff Bilman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Thursday, March 8, 2012

Unrealized Potential

I wrote this cartoon about 15 years ago. The sad thing is, I still feel like it applies to me as much now as it did back then. Some (ie. my wife) would say I'm being too hard on myself. I agree - I always have been. But the idea of this massive gap between what I feel I could have achieved so far, and what I have achieved still gnaws at me.

Do you think George Clooney feels like this? "Man, I wish I'd done Water World instead of all those Steven Soderbergh movies." Okay, maybe that's not the best example. George has probably got close to his potential - but that's from an outsider's perspective, maybe he feels he hasn't?

Then there's the people who seem to have miraculously obliterated their maximum potential as perceived by class-mates, family or friends (from now on known as PPQ - Perceived Potential Quotient). Whether it's a great career, a really hot partner, or an amazing sense of inner peace - I don't know how to feel about these people that seem to be so obviously punching above their weight...

That's an egg by the way, not an egg-like depiction of me. I have no idea what he's doing up there, why, or his chances of successfully diving into that glass of water.

But I digress ... I think one of the problems is I tend to assign a value to myself based on my achievements. It's kind of like a "what you do" instead of a "who you are" focus. There's probably many reasons for this - but I blame (and there - I've said the word - BLAME) - yes, I blame the time I was in U8's Little Athletics. I won a Gold medal at the State Championships in the triple jump AND broke the State record (I also won bronze in the long jump). The following two years I made the finals but no medals, and it's been all downhill from there. Every time I hear Bruce Springstein's "Glory Days" it takes me back to the good old days. Imagine how a real athlete must feel.

And before I go any further, I want to acknowledge how lucky I am. Just by living in Australia I am better off than most people in the world when it comes to health, education, government, financial, etc. Ask someone in a poor country about unrealized potential. That's the real tragedy.

WHOA BOY! Hang on a minute.

I have a confession to make. I spent countless hours writing and re-writing the rest of the post after this point. It kept changing, and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and more complicated. I've trashed it all.

At one stage I thought I was on to the Holy Grail - so profound and far-ranging where my thoughts - they were coming together better than those physicists attempting to find a unified theory of everything (my calculations ruled out string theory - Strings - Seriously! Theoretical Physicists are on another planet man).

I was ready to print my enormous blog out, take it to the nearest University, dump it on their desk, and ask, "Can I have my PhD now please? Just call me Dr Jeff."

But I was also losing sleep - and I was beginning to have doubts. I began to ponder whether my thesis was actually making sense - occasionally it might even be contradicting itself. And even worse, I began dreaming about the damned thing. I woke up, disturbed, and knew I had to make a choice. I could spend the next 20 years refining my theory, or I could let it go. I soon realized that, to be honest, I wasn't that smart. And the last three nights I'd barely said a word to my family - so intent was I on refining my discovery. If it went on like this I could miss out on 20 years of their life, as well as my own. So I let it go.

I will definitely come back to this topic one day - let's face it, there's at least another 4 blogs worth of material. But I will say this: the cartoon at the top of this page was written by a guy in his early 20's. As you get older things change, priorities change. And it was based on a very narrow focus - CAREER. So maybe I've not achieved all I've wanted to in that realm of my life (and hopefully there's a lot of years left if I choose to pursue it), but as you know there's so much more to life. And in many of those aspects I think I've done okay.

So with that in mind, I'll leave you with this totally irrelevant and unrelated cartoon.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Meaning of Stuff

Welcome to my first blog. 'Stuff' is a great word. It's so general. It can mean anything.

"Where'd you put my stuff?"
"What stuff?"
"You know, my stuff?"
"I didn't touch your stuff! Why would I want your stuff? Your stuff sucks."
"No, your stuff sucks!"

So does anybody know what these two people are actually talking about? No...? Come on, of course you do - they're talking about stuff. And like the conversation above, I hope you get just as much knowledge and insight from this blog - my Journey into Stuff.

It's a collection of stuff from my past and the present, as I attempt to make some sense out of, well - please don't say it again... stuff.

Creativity
I've tried a lot of creative pursuits. I think it's been my way of trying to figure out stuff. The first thing I tried was cartooning. And since it was where I started - way back in the early 90's when Grunge AND Jeff Buckley ruled (a testament to how good Jeff Buckley was) - I think it's a good way of starting out here too.

These are some of my early cartoons. Many were self-published on a now defunct website I called "Elephant Tales" - predominantly focusing on a quirky elephant named Eric (any emotional likeness to me is purely coincidental - and besides - it was a long time ago). I'll try and put at least one of these old cartoons up with each blog.

The first "Eric" I drew properly:

Another early cartoon. This was one of my favorites. I had it made into a t-shirt in the days when you actually had to go to a screen-printer to get it done.

I always felt like the black sheep, especially in my late teens/early 20's - ditching an accounting job to draw...

... and attempt to play music.

I still play (very poorly), and still harbor ambitions of writing at least one song that I actually like. I once wrote a song called Soul Destroyer - it was about somebody I used to work with. It was a hard rock style of song, but not very good. I tried several variations - one being acoustic - it still wasn't very good, but somehow it was sort of funny.

Until next time ...

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