How can this be?

I find it funny... I've been INSANELY busy lately. School is about to start- my fourth year. (Yeah, don't say it out loud... I am ready to scream at any second just thinking about it!) As a RA, we've been in training for the last 2 weeks, along with moving and everything else. This week is check-in in the dorms.

I'm just not ready! It's all happening so fast! And yet...

I wouldn't mind graduating in a month. I kind of want to leave CalArts. I want to work. I want to NOT have three things I need to do every day. School, work, homework. School, work, homework! Cycle, rinse, repeat- every day!

So I find it really really odd that the ONE thing I look forward to every day and think about every day, and wish I could do every day, and MISS when I don't get to do it is ANIMATE! It's all I want to do now. I find such a strange sense of zen when I work. Especially when you hit that unbelievably productive kick! (You know, the one that even Candy Crush Saga can't even drag you away from?)

I love it so much now. Hard to believe that three years ago I'd never even animated a ball bounce, and today I am animating an old guy climbing a ladder. I started sometime this afternoon and suddenly find myself sitting here at 2:30 in the morning- and I DON'T FEEL IT! I was doing so well and just moving through it so much that I don't even feel tired. I feel like I could animate until the sun comes up. I feel like it gives me energy now- whereas it used to drain me. I still don't know if it's what I want to do for the foreseeable future, but right now- I absolutely love animating. I don't miss the things I am missing out on with people on the outside- hell, I hardly miss the people!, I don't worry about what anyone thinks of me (this is actually something I wish I never felt, but I digress...), and I don't care about anything but: "Will it look right?", "Does it work?", "Will it convey everything I want?".

I had a discussion with a girlfriend of mine about animation and we remembered my freshman year and the entire class sitting in absolute stunned silence as we all watched our first assignment (the aforementioned ball bounce) play on the projector. (That was such a long, long time ago.) But we both admitted that every time we animate, we are secretly searching for that feeling we had on watching a successful assignment: that feeling of satisfaction and awe. That feeling that WE made that happen! ~WE~ made that pencil line COME TO LIFE! WE control the art monkeys and make them dance- what?

Is there seriously anything better in this world than seeing something you've made be everything you wanted it to be? I can't think of anything that gives me this thrill anymore. All the crap I used to do to fill my time is just that- crap. I don't care about it, or ~think~ about it the way I think about animating. (Okay, maybe I miss knitting every now and then... But honestly, that's very similar to animating. You're making something, and you ~think~ you know what it will look like when finished. Sometimes you fuck it up and you have to go back and fix it. Very frequently it doesn't live up to your expectations. And very rarely, you think you know how it's going to look, and you are amazed with some crazy happenstance that makes it better than you ever dreamed...)

Also- it takes a fucking long time! Just like animation.

Sometimes I wish I could just quit everything and do nothing else but animate... Then I remember I have bills to pay.