Ivory Tower 2013

and more. One of your old art professors will write you a glowing reference letter. Check your email ten times per day in anticipation of a message reading “Congratulations! We’d love to have you!” in your inbox. EA Games will get back to you first. They tell you that your work with paint and charcoal is amazing, but your style with digital mediums is not in line with where the gaming industry is headed.

Pixar and DreamWorks tell you that your style is too mature for their audiences.

Keep dating Kelly on and off. She’s been working double shifts at the hospital and has saved more money than you’ve had in your entire lifetime. She doesn’t have time to meet any other guys and you don’t feel up to the task of meeting any other girls. So, at the urging of your dad, ask her to marry you, even though you know you don’t love her. Let your parents shower the two of you with a $50,000 wedding and reception that includes a photo booth, a psychic, and little jars of jam at each place setting that read “J & K Forever.” Thank your mom for all of her hard work and planning. Miss the days when all you had to do was become a better artist.

Blow $500 on new art supplies just to prove to yourself that you haven’t lost your game that you can pick this back up at any time. Arrange the goods into piles—acrylic paint, oil based, gesso, watercolors, etc. Then rearrange them into color-coded piles to kill time. Kelly will come home that night from the hospital in her scrubs, stand silently in front of you and your bounty, and give you one of her worried looks.

You receive daily calls from your dad hounding you to “get a damn job already.” You and Kelly will move back to your hometown. Take an IT job, and try to act excited when she tells you she’s pregnant.

Wonder how the hell you’ll ever take care of a baby. Work. Save to buy your first four-bedroom house with a backyard. Your dad will insist that you get one with a three-stall garage even though you only own one beat up Camry and a bicycle. Paint one of the rooms in your new house as a nursery—it’s your latest work of art.

Pretend to be up with your new son when really you’re in the den sketching at 4:30 a.m. You have to be to work in three hours, but forget about that. Reach for your ten-cent notebook and sketch a warrior tricked out like Beowulf. Sketch him wearing a heavy coat of mail.

He’ll stare back at you with an empty look on his face. Ball that sketch 63