OK, it really doesn't make much of a difference because this is only a freaking Associate of Arts degree, the biggie I received is still the Bachelors of Arts in Psychology from Woodbury University. Nevertheless, the news that the Academic Senate of Los Angeles Valley College, my home away from home, has conferred upon me an Associate of Arts in Media Arts: Digital Post Production, is reason to celebrate. More after the flip.
Here's the official notification:
From: Records Department <[blanketyblank]@lavc.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 11:50 AM
Subject: Graduation
To: [blanketyblank]@woodburyuniversity.edu
... [Pris from LA] —
A.A. Degree in Media Arts with the Post-Production Option has been
granted as Fall 2010 and is posted on your record. You will be
notified at a later date when the diploma is ready for pick-up.
[LAVC Records Department]
I didn't check my Woodbury University alumni address for a few weeks, so I didn't see this notification until 11 days after the fact. But it's still awesome to see.
I was one of the people who got a new lease on life when the Internet burst forth in the mid '90s. I had been ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (At that point the preferred term was Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, or CFIDS, but since nobody quite understands why it happens or even entirely what systems it attacks, the term used is back to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, CFS.) and the thing was that building websites was something I could do at home. I would have to deliver on-time and on-schedule, but my hours were my own, and if I had to kick it a bit I could.
I wound up working with a small ISP in Venice, making "brochureware" web sites for small businesses. I worked with them for about 3 years as their one web designer. The ISP was a husband and wife partnership. Hubby was the network guru, Wifey was the sales and marketing wizard. They were based out in Venice, I was back here in the Valley.
I grew stronger during this time, and although I still had some nagging "leftovers" from my bouts with CFS (diminished strength and stamina, occasional bouts of vertigo, and even the occasional split-second lapse of consciousness) I was feeling a lot better than I did for a while. I also got my clinical unipolar depression dealt with, and by coincidence, the medication I was prescribed for the depression was one also widely used to ease the symptoms of CFS: a tricyclic antidepressant. It left me wondering about the chicken vs. egg question regarding my illness: was the CFS the cause of the depression, or was an inherited chemical imbalance one of the reasons why I had CFS? I had family history of clinical depression and anxiety: anxiety was a companion to my depression, and even after my depression lifted anxiety was still a problem.
By the time 1999 rolled around, and World + Dog seemed to be working in some capacity or another for the Internet, some rapid-fire changes happened. The relationship between the partners in the ISP suddenly snapped like a rubber band yielding to stress. At the same time, the distaff partner in the company got an appealing offer to work up in the Bay Area at a competitive long distance carrier. The carrier was going to build the biggest trans-Pacific optical trunk line to date, connected on the one end to the Bay Area, and the other end to Tokyo, Japan, with a hop in Sydney, Australia. The bandwidth subsidiary was meant to be an "express lane for the Pacific Rim internet." I got pulled in to build an intranet for the sales and marketing division, and to keep the company's forward-facing website running.
Eventually the plan got more grandiose, as a British firm wanted in on things. The final destination of the great trans-Pacific trunk line was now Hong Kong, and there would be some investment in some Atlantic links as well. It all seemed so awesome, we were building the future of world connectivity, and everything was going along just fine.
What we didn't know was that the CEO and CFO of the company were busy hollowing out the company, and that the "burn rate" of money was not a result of furious construction, but high living for them and a small circle of underlings. It all caved in on Monday, March 13th, 2000. The Dot Bomb exploded, and the scheme unraveled. By June, the first brutal wave of layoffs hit. I was in the first wave. My former boss at the Venice ISP was in the second wave. The company was delisted on the day after New Year's 2001, and auctioned off by April, 2001.
By then, I was looking at long-term unemployment. I became eligible for retraining funds through the Workforce Investment Act. Did I go looking for training for a medical assistant job or some other job training that might be able to weather the storms that already were and were to come? Nope. I wound up in tech school learning about Microsoft networking.
I knew a fair amount about UNIX networking, and the small ISP was one of the few that ran on a Windows NT network. The network guru was a Digital VMS guy originally, and migrated to Windows NT because it was designed by the same ubergeek who designed the VMS operating system. He sneered at UNIX, and had even more contempt for Mac. "God I don't know why you graphics types swear by your Macs. They crash, and when they crash everything's brought down. Way too brittle for me." (Remember, this was before Mac OS X, about 1996-1997.)
Anyway, around September 10th, 2001, I was two tests away from getting my MCSE in Windows 2000. I had the second-to-last test scheduled on September 13th. I would be done with this all by the end of 2001, and in 2002 I'd be in clover at an entry-level Windows networking position. The economy was starting to turn itself around. Heck, even the Dot Coms that survived were beginning to stretch and flex their muscles.
We all know what happened next.
I was in shock, but I managed to eke out a passing score on my second to last test. But I was in a huge funk with all that transpired next. I flunked one test, then a retest, and then I tried another elective module and the first go sort of sucked. It took until the beginning of 2002 to finish what I started. It looked like I might wind up like I did when I left West LA College in 1984, around the time they started charging per-unit fees.
Time for a nested flashback! Oh joy.
When I started at Los Angeles Valley College the first time, in Fall of 1980, I had "tested out" from high school, and was only 16. I had dreams of being a rock and roll photographer and journalist...sort of a cross between Cameron Crowe and Lynn Goldsmith. I shied away from "solids" and took courses that interested me. Which didn't include any math. Language arts had always been easy for me, and related subjects like history and social studies were fun for me too. Science was fun in Elementary school, but when I started going to what was then called "Junior High" it stopped being fun because OMG math was involved.
Then riots happened at Van Nuys High School and spilled over into Van Nuys Junior High. My mom took me right out of public school, and parlayed the fact that I had lost my father to ALS a few months previous into a voucher for "non-public schools" for me. This required the hanging of the label "emotionally handicapped" around my neck. Hated it. But at least in those poor excuses for schools the faculty called "therapeutic learning environments" I was able to avoid math. Not so great was the fact that these "therapeutic learning environments" did not keep track of high school credits for graduation.
By the time 1979 rolled around, it became clear the only way I could graduate from high school with a diploma was the California High School Proficiency Exam. NOW the CHSPE is pretty close to being identical with the GED, and demands GED level proficiency in every subject. Back then, it was very practical and checked whether you could make change, read a want ad, apply for a job, and things like that. The math was all basic arithmetic like keeping your checkbook balanced. So the big test I was prepping for through most of 1979 and half of 1980 was a pleasant letdown. I passed with ease.
Anyway, by 1984, I was finally getting serious about getting a degree. I wanted to finish and get my bachelors from Cal State Long Beach because their journalism program was second-to-none in the whole CSU system. But one thing got in my way. My mom was not going to "open her books" for financial aid. "That's nobody's business," she said, testily. "Besides, you've been in college too long. Either you come to an endgame with regard to your classes or you look for a job." I tried to explain, "They're going to charge tuition in CSU, and they're starting this Fall in the LA Community College District." In order for me to get any kind of financial aid, I was going to need my mom to "open her books" so that I could fill out my applications and get financial aid. "You should get a job" was her final word to me. End of school for a while.
I managed to get into a real clip joint of a business school after a checkered period of work and looking for work. I didn't finish there because around the middle of 1986 I injured my neck and shoulders in a bus accident, and there was no such thing as the Americans with Disabilities Act to force them to tailor my typing tests to adapt around my inability to turn my neck for a while. So I told them to bugger off, and that was that. That was that except for the financial aid, which they happily gave me on my information alone. The tab I ran up there continues to haunt me to this day.
In any event, back to present day, present time in my narrative. By 2003 I had had my fill of working McJobs. Richie had started teaching music in people's homes by then, and had enough money going to where we were meeting our bills and doing OK. So going back to school to finish what I started was now the order of the day. This meant finally dealing with math, because there was no way to get one's AA without it. Back 20 years before then, there was no math requirement, and you could skate by with "symbolic logic" or a computer programming class instead of math.
The new requirements required Beginning Algebra and English 101 as non-negotiables. You had to have passing grades on both. You also needed an "American Political Institutions" class, a "Healthful Living" class, and one PE class, which were requirements I remembered from 20 years before. Everything else was negotiable depending on what your major was. I was preparing to transfer to a 4-year university, so basically all I took at that point were solids, solids and more solids.
I found out at that point I had math related learning disabilities. This might have been the root of my loathing of math.
Somehow I managed to hold on and make it through Beginning Algebra, taken in two parts because it was something I could manage. When I took pre-Algebra before Beginning Algebra I wound up having to take an incomplete on it and finish it the next semester because I was just having such a tough slog. It helped that my husband Richie was still among the living...he was my math tutor, and helped me not only through pre-Algebra and Beginning Algebra but Intermediate Algebra, two semesters of Statistics, and Research Methods at Woodbury.
During the Winter Break in 2006, I had already finished one year at Woodbury and was on track to complete the rest of my classes. However, Richie was feeling very weak and very run-down. It was like a flu that wouldn't quit. OMG, I thought. Whatever caused my CFS had hit him. However, that was not what was going on. On the day after Christmas, 2006, after two weeks in the hospital, Richie was notified that he had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. And he was also notified that he should report to a County ER to get into the County health care system, because the hospital that took him in could not give him the care he required.
By the middle of January Richie was accepted by City of Hope. It helped my uncle was a big donor. I was a starving student, and Richie was no longer able to teach music. No health insurance, of course. City of Hope took him in, and he got some of the best and most forward looking care anyone could. It is incredibly ironic but if we had health insurance he would not have been able to go to City of Hope, because for most insurers it's out-of-network. It would have not been likely that Richie would have gotten the treatments that bought him about a year of complete remission. He would have been dead in a matter of weeks instead of the year and a quarter we had together.
And hey, did I mention I was still pulling a full course load at Woodbury?
It was a good, prudent choice I made, to walk early, because of the uncertainty of Richie's condition. I wanted him to see me at another commencement, to celebrate how far I had come. And I didn't know if he'd still be around in May, 2008. Turned out that this was indeed a good call, alas, because I lost him in March of that year. He came in with the Fall Equinox of 1952 and left with Spring Equinox, 2008. He saw me through to the end of my classes at Woodbury, however, and he knew I had earned my Baccalaureate in Psychology. With honors.
Anyway, 2008 was the time of yet another crisis that turned the finances of the US upside down. By the time I went looking for work after dealing with Richie's final affairs, things looked kind of murky. Then October hit, the stock market crashed, and suddenly everything was awry. I was hoping to get work or even some internships before I went back to school to get my Masters in Social Work. That didn't happen. And I started hearing the weirdest stuff from my former classmates: they were unable to get even the internships they needed to advance, and those who had finished their MA couldn't get the internships they needed to get the LCSW. And paying work? That was a laugh. Between the State of California and the County of Los Angeles freezing new hires, nobody could get work. People were going back to get Life Coach certification or Substance Abuse Counselor certification...never mind that there were no standards for that, and programs were pricy.
It became obvious that my BA in Psych was pretty much in the same category as my MCSE on Windows 2000: window dressing that said I had finished something I started, but would never open any doors for me.
What to do? What to do?
Woodbury University is not a for-profit college. It's actually, as Wikipedia describes, a "...a private, non-profit, coeducational, nonsectarian university located in Burbank, California." However, as a private 4-year university, I racked up a fair amount of student loans there. As it was, I didn't get hosed quite as bad as some others did, but I was still stuck with about $45,000 worth of loans between United College of Business, a smidge I took out at LAVC during my second trip there, and Woodbury. I am not as badly frakked as the people who went to absolutely useless for-profit schools like Kaplan University or University of Phoenix. But still...the doom song could be sung for me.
At least with most of the debt, I would be able to stave it off by taking six units or more at a higher learning institution. The old UCB student loans would still be due, but I'd just let them know I was in a "hardship situation."
So I went back, for the third time, to Valley. What would I major in?
OK, more background. Just imagine Wayne and Garth going "doodle a doo, doodle a doo" and waving their hands.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley means growing up with the movie industry. I'm not talking pr0n here. I'm talking legit movies and TV. You either end up one of two ways: either as totally jaded about the Industry and complaining about filming and hating everything about it; or taking a job in a Starbucks and hoping your screenplay sells, and secretly harboring fantasies of "but what I really want to do is direct."
I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. I fell in love with the movies at an early age. However I knew that it was not fun and games from the get-go. I would see gaffers and grips and electricians struggle with carrying around lighting equipment on 100+ degree days. I'd see the hurry-up-and-wait tedium. I'd see that people bust their humps out there making entertainment. But it still was fascinating to me.
Back to the present...
What is really exciting to me about movies right now is that the barriers to entry are falling fast. I don't think you can make a theatrically credible movie with consumer grade equipment now. However, it's coming. Give it about 5 years.
So what I'm leading up to is the fact that I just got finished getting my second Associate of Arts degree, in Media Arts: Post Production. What do I want to do with it? Well, I would like either a paid entry-level position in a post-production house, or failing that, an internship.
I also would like to learn more about all aspects of independent production, and maybe do some projects of my own. Like I said, in five years' time, the barriers to quality production on a budget will probably fall completely in five years. The only remaining problems will be talent, skill and distribution.
Talent is one problem can't really be helped, although if you speak in terms of knack instead of talent that's something that could be acquired. Skills can be acquired, and sharpened with practice. Distribution is a tougher nut to crack, though. The pros don't even have it figured out yet. How do you find middle ground between expensive (physical media that people are buying less and less, theatrical distribution, with a huge barrier to entry) and free? (streaming, downloads of dubious quality/legality, etc.)
Things aren't all roses and lollipops now that I'm done. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about paying off my student loans. I need to also add, for those who didn't do the math, that I'm 47 freaking years old, and trying to get back in the workforce after being away so long. Who's going to hire me? I'm nervous as hell about that.
Anyway, thanks for sticking with this. I'm proud. But I'm still on very shaky ground.