First, I want to give a shoutout to the inspiration behind the title, my MassArt Film professor, Saul Levine. I guess part of the reason for my choice is that Saul’s film deals with his life’s turmoil and changes in a meditative style. And so many of us have been through a similar process since I published my last post in (gulp), 2020.

The Pandemic Rabbit Hole

In mid-March 2020, I was feeling like I had a handle on things. My kid was old enough to not need constant hovering. Freelance work was plentiful. I finally had a decent enough work-life balance to re-join a gym and had, in fact, just gotten to a respectable level of distance running on the treadmill. There were reports on the news of Covid being bad in a few nursing homes, but we were all thinking: “As long as we’re careful and wash our hands…”

So, I went to the gym one day, timing it so I would have just enough time to hit the sauna after running and still be able to get a few things at Stop & Shop before school pickup. As soon as I drove into the S&S parking lot I could sense a difference in the atmosphere. For starters, the lot was filling up fast. Then, I walked into the store and there were only a few carts at the front…

People were practically sprinting through the aisles. I watched one person use their arm to sweep half a shelf of Oreos into their cart. And then I noticed all the carts with piles and piles of bottled water and canned goods. Every opening scene of every apocalyptic disaster movie I’ve ever watched started racing through my mind. I grabbed the stuff I had in my mental list and got into an uncomfortably long line behind the Oreo-hoarder.

As soon as my daughter got into the car at school her phone was blowing up with texts from her friends. That’s how I found out that our neighboring town had declared all public schools closed “until further notice”. That phrase became a mantra over the next few days, then weeks, then months. Everything seemed in suspended animation, like one of those shots in The Matrix where they dodge gunfire in slo-mo 360. Even nature seemed to take the hint. It became a ritual when my daughter and I went out to drive by the local university to see if the cherry trees that lined the entrance had bloomed yet, as if seeing that would be some sort of sign from the universe.

Of course, several freelance projects dried up over the first few weeks of lockdown. And what was also a kick in the pants was my “fall-back job” of Ubering was also off the table. Nothing to work on, no place to go, nothing to do but try to find a way to occupy my mind and resist the urge to doom-scroll. The fact that one of the books I had read the previous year was a detailed history of the great flu epidemic of 1918 didn’t exactly help.

At least that had been written from a scientific perspective. What I was seeing on the news now what so absurd that I started to wonder if we had all been drafted into a bizarre social experiment like “The Wave”. Perhaps the worst thing was gradually seeing people I knew buy into the collective fantasy that if we just ignored a highly communicable and unpredictable virus it would go away and anyone who advocated vaccinations and masking were the truly the ones who were one of them.

I watched the world around me slide in opposite directions until I didn’t recognize it anymore. Anyone could be anything. Wear a mask to the grocery store while on the hunt for toilet paper and get screamed at that I wasn’t a “real American”. Dart three feet into the ketchup aisle against the direction of the arrow taped on the floor and I was a heedless sociopath who would bring death upon us all.

Moving on, if you are reading this then you know the rest. Vaccinations arrived. People began returning to work, the economy began coming back to life, slowly. But people continued clinging to their chosen realities and screaming at each other from their perches, occasionally flinging their dung back and forth. We re-emerged from lockdown into a world where no one trusted each other anymore and even the neighbor who waved at you from their driveway today could be waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag at the nation’s capital in January. Not knowing what was really going on behind familiar faces was unsettling to say the least.

Navigating this new social landscape turned out to be emotionally and professionally exhausting. Thankfully I began to get new clients as people started to find their way in the new economy, but meeting people in person felt strange and my guard was always up, waiting for that moment when they might put me on blast over something since the past year had everyone on edge.

Back to School

Throughout most of lockdown and into post-vaccination Covid, I drove for Uber when I could. The money was surprisingly good since a lot of people didn’t want to take any chances. For most of the time I did deliveries and it felt good to get out of the house and drive around burgers and burrito bowls and not people who would want to pick a fight over wearing a mask in my compact car. This was during the period when the local news would post a map every day showing who was in the “green zone” (few Covid cases) and who was in the “red zone” (high number of cases per 100 people). I wore a mask AND nitrile gloves since inevitably the customers in the red zone neighborhoods like to roll up to my car without a mask on. The green zone people were the ones who left paragraph long instructions in the app about leaving their food at the door and texting the news of its arrival. Funny how that works.

Actual photo of me delivering take-away to someone’s house (JK)
person in a medieval plague doctor costume holding a delivery bag
Photo by Ashley Levinson on Unsplash

There had been times in the past few years when I had checked out coding boot camps and tried out a few classes at Khan Academy in an effort to learn more than the scope of what I had taught myself in a decade of freelance web design. What 99.8% of the freelance community won’t tell you is that hanging out your shingle as a freelance web developer is 5% coding ability and 95% chutzpah. But, what I learned from a former life in the film business is that it’s almost more important to know that you don’t know half as much as you think you do.

One day I had some downtime and was poking around on the Uber app and noticed I had achieved something called “Gold Status”. Ever the points/rewards/bonus-motivated little worker bee, I swiped through to see what benefits that entailed, expecting to see it would get me a free Slurpee every other Tuesday or some nonsense. Actually, for my faithful service delivering Chipotle and McDonalds throughout the North Shore, I was eligible for full tuition reimbursement at Arizona State University. A quick search on the web revealed that ASU is, in fact, a real university with sports and dorms and tenured professors. And the kicker, they offered a 4 year degree program in Full Stack Web Development.

Damn.

I had to dig out my high school transcript as well as my Mass Art one of course. Amazingly, a lot of my MassArt academic credits transferred over and by October of 2021, I was a college freshman again. And, I could do all my coursework without leaving my bedroom because, due to Covid, ASU had made all its classes available online. Suddenly I was thrown back into a world of assigned chapters, term papers and exams.

My first drawing assignment for Visual Design Thinking: “Desssine-moi une maman pterodactalique”
hand drawing of a mother pterodactyl and her two babies

And of course, since I had chosen a major involving programming, I found myself required to take (and pass) College Algebra. As soon as I found out that I would first have to take the ALEKS placement exam my palms started sweating. I hadn’t taken a single math course since (no lie) 1986. Which is before most of my ASU instructors were born. I put the placement exam off as long as I could, but it loomed in the background, promising to expose my right-brained-ness to the world. I studied. I purchased an ALEKS exam guide on Amazon (waste of time) and fretted until finally signing into ALEKS with my student ID and stumbling through the 50 problems feeling nauseous. It didn’t help that I had to be visible on my webcam the entire time and feeling that somewhere some 20 year old proctor was laughing their ass off at me trying to solve for X.

I accepted my humbling assessment score and embarked on a journey through the ALEKS “pie”. It’s a maze of example problems, a brief explanation of theory and then a series of problems to solve that threw in all sorts of equation variables that the explanation didn’t cover. And, if you manage to struggle through enough units, you get a colorful popup screen congratulating you for completing another pie slice. And it’s not even key lime or chocolate cream.

young dog sitting on a couch with one ear standing straight up
Felt cute, might chew up 5 hours worth of math notes later (which she did)

Being on a three-course per session track, including College Algebra, Intro to Javascript and Psychology 101, it seemed like the perfect time to adopt a rescue dog from Texas. And not just any dog, but a Plotthound/Shepherd/Pitbull mix that grew exponentially and arrived in our home just as she began her teething phase. I had to stop my coursework it seemed like every 20 seconds to tell her to stop chewing firewood, or rescue our 2 year old cat from her jaws. My low point was her taking an enormous dump on a floor rug in the background while I was on a Zoom meeting with a client.

Three years went by in a blur. If you asked me right now what course I took when I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I liked most of them, even the ones where I didn’t do so hot because I was juggling freelancing for clients with Ubering to keep up my points enough to qualify for tuition, parenting a teenager through post-Covid high school life and keeping the dog from devouring the cat.

Here’s a few things I remember though:

Going on what was supposed to be a fun family getaway camping in New Hampshire with a final assignment due for my InDesign class (InDesign is the Microsoft Pages of Adobe Creative Suite). All assignments were due on Arizona time, so I had until 11:59pm MST. After practically throwing my daughter, her friend and their tent out of the car at the campsite for my husband to deal with, I raced back to the nearest Starbucks and endured a panic attack while my computer booted up. Then, when Starbucks closed, I raced down the street to McDonalds to finish my TechCrunch Disrupt brochure concept before they closed at midnight. Then, driving back to the campsite, realized I had forgotten to post my submission to the class Slack channel and pulled into a church parking lot in the dark to pirate their wifi and finish.

Being required to take a database design course that had apparently been designed by the professor in 1988 and never updated. We were required to download a database modeling program that was so obscure you could only get it by emailing its developer via their website, which hadn’t been updated since 2007 apparently. Plus, it only worked on a PC. After enough students complained about not being able to access the program, the professor just let us recreate the textbook’s diagrams in Photoshop.

Taking Javascript, Python and Java courses that attempted to fit huge numbers of modules each into nine week sprints. This is like trying to take in the entire Natural History Museum in New York in an hour. You might get the gist that there were once creatures called dinosaurs and North America was once solely populated by tribes with a variety of fascinating cultures, but damned if you could describe an instance of those in detail.

And just like that…

Look who got their diploma!
bachelor of science diploma from ASU

I turned in my last assignment for ASU Senior Portfolio at 11:23pm on May 6, 2024. I had been waiting so long for a moment when I didn’t have an exam to cram for, a paper to trudge through or an assignment to tie my stomach in knots. And it was finally here. It felt anti-climactic somehow, but then the realization kicked in. I now had a Bachelor of Science in Graphic Information Technolory (Magna Cum Laude too). No longer did I have to feel that little cold trickle of unease when I surfed job listings and saw “Four Year Bachelors Degree required”. I had that. And, as my Senior Portfolio professor stressed with me, I also had over a decade in real world design experience. Even in the depths of College Algebra and teaching a 60 pound puppy not to shit indoors, I had designed and developed multiple web projects including an LMS system for a corporate consultant business and a 50 page site for a credit-union bank.

A tour of the credit union home page

In addition to learning how to solve for X and how to code an arrow function, I also learned the following:

How to manage my time despite being the de facto “on-call” parent and all the random stuff life can throw under your feet. Sometimes it required staying up literally all night to get something done, but being accountable for keeping a GPA above a 3.7 taught me how to organize my time around true priorities and not distractions.

Focusing on what I am good at is a million times better than anxiety over failing. My brain is good at working its way through a coding challenge and testing and retesting until something works. I am able to be an effective communicator through writing. My mind loves a design challenge but it hates graphing quadratic functions.

Don’t waste too much time trying to make everybody happy. I used to say to myself that I would never be one of those freelancers who ghosts a client, but then there were a few clients that became disrespectful of my time and experience. So, I learned how to gracefully bow out of some situations and remove myself from some unhealthy relationships.

Still reading? Appreciate you.

If you made it down to this point, then thank you. I really enjoy writing and sometimes get carried away. But every time I glanced at the Jennsweb blog and saw that “2020” staring back at me on my last post I felt complete “cringe”. Life was truly a rollercoaster for so long that I wasn’t sure how to get off and since May 6, have been walking around the carnival feeling a little dizzy. It felt great to get this all out there and I really hope I can keep writing on the regular now.