Mainstream

I had a conversation with my friend last night that really got me thinking back on my college days. ��I realize that, in the almost two years I’ve been keeping this blog, I’ve never really talked about my days as a student at the University of Texas at Dallas. ��I’ve touched on Grad School here and there, but for the most part, I keep my college days in my past.

There are a few reasons for that. ��For one thing, I��was a very different person back then. ��Not so different that I would hate myself or that you wouldn’t recognize me, but I definitely had an attitude. ��I was still bitter about a lot of things that had happened��to my family and to people I love. ��I didn’t know what I wanted to do or how I was going to get to wherever I was going.

In spite of my personal issues, UTD was a great school. ��I learned a lot and for the most part, had a pretty great time. ��There was one class there, though, that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I won’t name names or reveal the exact class because I don’t want to be the person who trash talks others online. ��I can tell you one was a study of the arts class and I took nothing away from it��except that I wanted to do the exact opposite of everything that instructor told me. ��I saw no value in what was taught and I found a lot of the material weird, inappropriate, and to be honest, a little gross. ��I was genuinely disturbed by what that professor considered “art” and truly resented the way he looked down on “mainstream” artists. ��For him, an artist or a writer or a filmmaker only had value if what they produced was “outside the box,” in other words “weird and creepy.”

Do you want to know my dirty little secret?

I want to be mainstream. ��I want my books and my photographs to appeal to a lot of different people. ��I don’t want to be a part of his stupid, snobby, elitist group of “artists” who “think��outside the box.”

Don’t get me wrong. ��I think genuinely thinking outside the box is a good thing. ��I think it’s a very good thing. ��But what this guy called “thinking outside the box,” I call “being weird for the sake of shock value.” ��And some of it was really shocking, let me tell you. ��I won’t go into detail, but one of his “projects” involved really disgusting puppets. ��It still gives me nightmares.

I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about my education at UTD. ��My academic experience was, overall, very, very positive. ��But our discussion last night really got me thinking about this one class. ��To be honest, I’m not even sure that professor is still there or if that class is still being taught. ��All I can tell you��is that if he ever contacts me and tells me that he likes my books, I’ll know I’ve done something wrong.