a vacation, sorta

 
Our annual family beach vacation was last week and what a week it was.  We've had plenty of perfect beach vacations over the years with beautiful weather, no rain, great temperatures, awesome places to stay, beautiful views and lots of fun.  Keeping that in mind, along with the very awkward weirdness going on daily in our world and our country, I'm very grateful to have had the week we had.  And while I'm grateful to have had any vacation at all with family, I'm sure at least G would have wanted a couple of things to have been a little different.  So let's have a look at a few of the week's happenings by category:

Playing in the sand...

Yes, I'm a grown adult man and I still love playing in the sand.  I'm sure this seems weird to other adult men on the beach, but I think it's just as weird to stand in the sun fishing for Lord knows what or drinking your red belly larger by consuming all the cans of beer in sight while your evil spawn squeal and scream all day.  (Please note that where we have been staying the last several years, we don't have any of this nonsensical behavior.  Our beach neighbors were stellar, even the kids!  But I've seen it and it's one of the reasons we've continued to migrate south on the Grand Strand.)

My internal clock wakes me up early on vacation.  I don't understand it.  Maybe it's because I've always been very excited about going to the beach and my brain is so happy it just wants me to be up to enjoy everything.  Either way, around sun-up, I'm up and headed out for my run.  When I get back, I shower and have a nice little breakfast on the balcony.  Then I'm out on the beach early to beat the heat and I spend a few minutes (hours) playing by myself in the sand.  

The family trickles out on their own schedule and they take over the chairs and umbrella spots while I bask in the sun and make some sort of sand sculpture.  This involves shoveling a ton of sand and carrying 5 gallons of water from the ocean multiple times to pack the sand before I then stand awkwardly in front of the heap of sand trying to decide what I want to make.  Sure, I could plan ahead and probably save myself some time and embarrassment, but I'm on vacation and preparing feels more like work.  Then there's more moving of sand as I carve with my fingers and hands.  Sometimes I have to get the shovel back out and move a big chunk to another area because I didn't plan ahead, but in 2 or 3 hours, I'm washing the sand off my hands and taking a few photos.  

After the photos, I get to drink water, sit in the chair and relax for the rest of the day.  Most days I'll go in for lunch and from the balcony I'll notice people walking by and taking photos of whatever I made.  It's a nice feeling.  I'm sure some of them don't know exactly what it is or why it is, but they seem to smile and enjoy seeing it.  The last couple of years I've been signing them with my IG handle and sometimes I'll get nice messages and even a photo from strangers like the one above.  It's really nice when strangers go to some trouble to thank you for doing something like this.  

When we get to go back out on the beach in the evening, most often the sculpture is still there.  It's always nice when people like it enough to not destroy it.  Last week, we had the pleasure of recognizing some of the families from previous years and they felt comfortable talking to me about things.  A few asked if I was the guy from last year and some will ask me what I made on a certain day.  The truth is, I have no idea.  The days blur together on a good vacation and once I make them, I turn them over to nature and forget about them.  I understand that after that photo, they don't belong to me anymore.  

When we went out on our last night of vacation, we found this note on the back of my final sculpture.  It made me very happy.  Make no mistake, making these things is hard work.  I started the week thinking that I'd make maybe 4 sculptures.  I had a sand sculpture thing planned for the day after vacation and I didn't want to overdo it.  Oh, another fun little note is that Walter the crazy puppy dog somehow destroyed my pinky finger a week before vacation and it was still very swollen and painful when vacation started.  

Including this one, which is obviously not the best, I still made 6 sand sculptures during the week.  This one is what it is because the day started out rainy and we ditched the beach in favor of a day of shopping.  When the sun came out, I escaped the shopping and spent a couple of hours on the beach in the afternoon.  This one only took about 45 minutes.  So yeah, they're a lot of work, but there's also a lot of satisfaction knowing that you made someone smile when they saw it.  

Running like a crazy person...

My running insanity is well documented.  You know I run 3.1 miles every day.  One of my favorite things about vacation or travel is being able to run in new and beautiful places.  I mentioned we've stayed at this location before and one of my favorite things about it is it's proximity to Murrell's Inlet.  This little stretch of beach is the last bit before the big stone jettys and the inlet.  If you leave our little beach walkout and head south, you'll run just around the edge of the peninsula when you hit the 1.5 mile mark.  

Fewer humans go this far down so it's quiet and I'm often one of just two or three people out during this time.  The views there are almost other-worldly.  I often see dolphins in the ocean and all sorts of birds out looking for breakfast.  

The running is also cool, but it's the time alone out there with the surf and the sun rising that does it for me.  It's the best.  

Everyone in our family appreciates their own time and space.  We all know that during vacation, we're stuck a little closer than we want for a little longer than we want.  We love being together and we're a pretty tight family, but we need our space.  This is the time that keeps me from going off on the family on these trips.  It's so beautiful and so quiet.  I love it.  The running is also good for me, I guess.

We all have those moments when we question our life choices.  I've ran during some crazy and I do mean CRAZY times.  All sorts of weather conditions, including hurricanes on the beach and all sorts of weird times of day.  I've been up at 4:00am running before but each time I do something like that, I wonder if I'm really not well.  I don't have an answer on that just yet, but I do know that I had to get up at 4:00am on the last day of vacation.  The beach was so dark I couldn't run there, so I went out onto the street and ran the roads in the dark alone.  

You wanna go out in the ocean?...

We've taken our tandem kayak with us on our beach vacations for the last several years.  First, Blue and I would kayak the inlet and explore on a day when we had grown weary of sunburn.  Then Violet started loving the kayak and Blue took the opportunity to escape.  For the last couple of years, I've woke up one morning of vacation and looked out on a very calm and flat ocean from the balcony.  I've done my best on those days to talk one of the kids into going out into the ocean with me in the kayak.  They've always emphatically declined.  This year it was early in the week and I sent the text to Violet telling her I was going out in the kayak and asked if she'd like to join me.  As I was talking Blue into helping me carry the kayak out to the beach, she responded "yes".  

It was on.  Now, if you're not a kayaker, here's the significance of this:  Our kayak is an open kayak with no spray skirt.  This means it's just a little plastic boat that holds people.  Which means it also holds water.  So if something like a wave crashes over your boat, it fills with water and you sink.  Violet knows this well because once, a million years ago, Blue sank his kayak in a lake.  Thus her reluctance to go out in waves.  

Whatever made her say yes, I wasn't questioning it, I just went with it.  Blue and I dropped the kayak in the sand and I had Violet in a life jacket and holding a paddle before she could second guess herself.  I knew the biggest danger was getting out past the surf and I simply told her that when I said go, she needed to get in and start paddling fast.  She did, I followed quickly and we paddled as hard as we could...right into a breaking wave.  It crested right over Violet's lap and filled the kayak about half full of water.  We paddled a little more and we were safely in the open water.  I hadn't thought about bringing anything to bail water, so I used my hands to get a few gallons out.  

Apparently it was quite the show for those on the beach.  We were told that everyone was watching us and they all seemed surprised when we didn't topple over or sink.  We didn't really have a plan past getting out in the water, but we quickly decided to paddle down to the inlet and back.  We didn't see any dolphins but the view was incredible.  These photos and a couple of funny videos are from Blue on the shore.  When we decided to go back out in the ocean a second time, we grabbed an old disposable waterproof film camera and took it with us.  It was Violet's first time using a film camera and it was a little different from the ones I remember, so we'll see if we get any photos from that in the next couple of days.  On our second trip a few days later, we rode the waves into the shore and they kept crashing over the back of the boat before we could get out.  We were already beached but the boat filled with water and we had to get Blue to help us turn it over the dump the water out just so we could pull it ashore.  10/10 amazing experience.  Highly recommend and would do it again.  

Random family moments...

We've developed habits when we go to the beach.  After beach things in the sun during the morning and early afternoon, we all go inside and get cleaned up at various times.  Then we often head out to find food and visit some of our favorite places.  Violet and I usually walk a good bit to look for sharks teeth and to people watch but her hip injury kept the walking to a minimum this year.  We did accidentally walk to the inlet one day.

We all have different favorite places to eat and we spread those out through the week.  I love a good lobster roll and Violet loves a crab pot.  We always pick the place on the inlet that has both along with great views.  

The lobster roll is so good.  I can still taste the butter.  Mmmmmmm.

Part of the fun is walking around the inlet.  There's a Marsh Walk and a little pier.  Lots of pelicans around and I do love a pelican.  It's a beautiful place.

This was our first time seeing my brother's new place.  My brother owns The Tangled Web in Spartanburg and he's getting ready to open the second location in Surfside Beach.  We stopped by to see him and to see the new place.  Later in the week we got to have dinner with him and see his apartment.

We're always on the lookout for fun sunglasses and great mirrors for photos.  This was going to be a family portrait until Blue and G took off across the store.

It was a good trip for stranger photos.  Every time I walk by a photo booth machine, I check the bin to see if someone left a copy of their pics.  From the looks of my collection, most people do.  If you want to bring me some joy, be sure to leave one of your copies in the bin for me to find.  Or, if you happen to find some strangers' abandoned photos, send them my way.  

After the sand sculpting is done, this is my view for the rest of the day.  I've had enough sun at that point, so after lunch on the balcony, I settle into the shade of the umbrella for a nap or a long, quiet meditation.  I can just sit here and stare out into the waves for hours.  

I apparently do weird things in public.  When we took this photo in Drippy's Ice Cream, I noticed my head looked like the second scoop on Violet's cone.  

So I spent the next few minutes trying to recreate the idea with my own cone.  It was deceptively difficult to line it up.  The whole time, Blue was taking photos of me trying to take my own photo.  This led to a whole rabbit hole of a conversation about making stickers with photos and being able to drop them into text conversations.  That led to all of us trying to add stickers to the family group chat at once.  The activity locked up my phone and then Blue's phone.  Messed them up so bad we both had to delete the chat and shut down our phones.  

We've driven by this place for 15 years or more without ever trying it.  Last week we found out it also has a bakery inside, so we finally stopped and tried it.  It was amazing.  Tiramisu, cannoli, and all sorts of really great sweets.  We also tried a pizza and were impressed.

One of my favorite things about where we stay on vacation is the sunsets.  The sun goes down over the marsh and it's beautiful from our door.  Our week started out with an odd haze that hid the sunsets completely on the first couple of nights.  Then there were a few nights we were out later and missed the sunset.  There was a cloudy night.  Over the first several days, this was the only sunset I got to see over the lake at Broadway.  

But at the end of the week, I finally got my marsh sunset.  I know, it sounds like a perfect week and like I said at the beginning, I have no room to complain.  The part I left out was that our little brown dog Timmy started getting sick just before we left home.  His sickness worsened while the dogsitter was there and we got pretty worried about him.  So much so that G had to get up very early one morning and drive home with the intention of taking him to the vet.  She got him some medicine and he started to improve so she was able to come back to the beach the next day.  As soon as our worries started to fade about Timmy, the next report from the dogsitter was that now Walter was sick with similar symptoms.  A new medication was prescribed and luckily the dogsitter was able to pick it up without us driving back home again.  By the end of the week, we were exhausted from worry and the dogs were both exhausted from the sickness.  

But also, we're lucky to have those goofy dogs.  Even when they break your pinky finger and interrupt your beach vacation.  So there we are on our last night of vacation.  A little more tan, sort of rested, kinda tired and full of ice cream and cannoli.  

a chaotic year

Hey y'all, check on your friends in academia.  They're probably not OK.  

This academic year has been so chaotic that when it finally ended (or at least, we had graduation) I felt weirdly unresolved.  Part of that is that I'm still having to do school stuff and even drive there several days this week, but it's also because it's just been impossible to process all the weirdness in real time.  

I process most of my days on the commute.  Sometimes through music or a good podcast, but sometimes I talk to myself out loud.  When there's more to digest, I take care of that in my sketchbook by logging some events and documenting the happenings for future reference.  This year has been a Lego type year, though.  Each strange and unprecedented event was followed by another and they just kept stacking up to build this very tall, very unstable tower.  I feel as if I've just been dodging missiles one right after another with no time to really reflect on the events.  Since that's one of the goals of this blog, I figured I owed it to myself to sit down and really recall and reflect a little.  One way I do that is through images.  I open my camera roll and thumb my way back to August before slowly scrolling through the academic year.

Dude.  It's crazy how much has happened.  So much has changed.  And then I get distracted by all the funny photos and crazy events that are documented on my phone and I forget that I started out trying to process the weirdness.  

Like, remember when I had to do surgery on one of the welding machines and we treated it like a real operating room situation?  Remember when Elena hated me on the first day of classes and then we became school besties?  Remember when MG and I had a snowball fight while delivering sculptures for an exhibit?  So many good memories.  See how easily I get distracted?

Anyway, we'll look at some photos together.  Let's start with a few things that just happened to me...

I got to be a part of Wim Roefs' memorial exhibit.  I was proud to be grouped with so many cool artists.  

I won an award from the SCAEA.  It was a big surprise and I was really honored.

I had a solo exhibit of my drawings and that was pretty cool.

I (we) got to visit Emily at her school and hang out with her.

Oh dude, there was a whole hurricane situation with school canceled for a week.  We lost power, had a bunch of trees down and I did a jigsaw puzzle obsessively on the dining room table.

Freakin' Walter joined the family.  What a chaotic mess he is.

Violet ran in state XC and did great.  She had a great year despite constant hip pain.  Today she had an MRI for that hip pain.  Still not out of the woods on that.

Blue went off to his first year of college.  The cool thing is that the college is the same one I work for.  It's been really cool seeing him several times each week.  

Then we have all the student related things in my camera roll.  This was really the thing that saved the academic year - the students.  There's some sort of tide that rolls in and out with student groups and this year, the tide was high.  So many great students who provided me with so much entertainment and joy.

This was our Charlie Brown Thanksgiving feast.  We had toast and popcorn, just like in the Thanksgiving special.  

Shine tormented me with cats and weird music all semester.

Babushkas!

Halloween costume fun with Payton and Mac!

Art hiking with the cool kids.

Ali got her masters degree.  I'm so proud of her.  I love her.

I took the cool kids to a jewelry workshop with Katie Poterala and they made very cool things.

Freakin' MG.  What a blessing to us all.  I got to spend 4 years with her talking about all the controversial religious things and helping her really understand what she needed to be making and why.  It was all so much fun.  Well, except the fact that she holds the record for the number of urgent care visits.  Everything else was great.

MG also made me another award and I was just as honored to receive it as I was the other one.  This seriously meant so much to me and I haven't fully processed that yet.  

The spring Art Gala was so much fun.  This group is the coolest.

We had a whole year of ninjas of kindness missions.  We made people uncomfortable and made them feel loved.  A win.

I got to teach all these people to weld and this was just one of three classes of Sculpture 1 this year.  I LOVE seeing people realize sculpture is amazing.  This was a fun group.

I'm not even sure what this was but it made me super happy to find it on my phone.  I think it was a film camera shot on exam day?  

So yeah, some really negative and irritating things happened throughout the year.  It was annoying and unnerving on many occasions but these students and their antics made all of it worth it for me.  If you want to know about the bad things, maybe take me out for a drink and I'll tell you.  The tea is hot and I'm all about spilling it in the right environment.  But today, let's just think about these happy times instead of dealing with the negativity.  

professor

 I'm neck-deep in my busiest semester of the academic year and I opened my computer today to check mail and saw a calendar invite for "Professor Doug McAbee".  I think I was having a moment because I looked at the words and lingered longer than usual.  

That's me.  "Professor".  I'm a professor.  

I've had this title officially now for 15 years and I still remember vividly the day I moved into my first academic office and saw that title and name printed on the room label.  I couldn't believe I was finally a professor.  An actual professor.  

I was working full time as a graphic designer while earning my MFA.  There were a lot of sacrifices during that time and a lot of worry too.  I hoped to get a teaching job after graduation but there was so much uncertainty surrounding that idea.  I lived in a county with at least 5 colleges and a couple of art departments but I already knew that those jobs were coveted and even if you waited around until someone died, there was a line of people waiting for that one job.  I knew that if I got lucky and landed a good job, I'd almost certainly have to move and then there would be so much more change.  I didn't like change.  I didn't like new situations.  I had a lot of fears and a lot of anxiety.  

Some of that anxiety was about school.  I saw myself as an average achiever from a small town.  I did ok in college, but I was mostly taking classes I loved so it was easy to do the work.  I knew I had artistic ability and I knew my professors were good.  I was confident about that while in undergrad, but grad school seemed like a whole other thing.  I didn't know a lot of people with graduate degrees.  I would be the first in my immediate family to earn one and among my friends, only the religious, seminary ones were getting grad degrees and, just between us, I didn't even think that counted.  No shade to the friends.  

Grad school was going to be high level classes with professors who were experts.  I was going to have to make an impressive body of work but I was also going to have to write a 20+ page thesis document to accompany the work.  I'll just be honest with you here, I feared I wasn't smart enough to do it.  I mean, I don't know that I wrote 20+ typed pages total in my entire K-12 and undergrad years.

In hindsight, making the work was difficult but not nearly as difficult as the writing.  I can write you a funny story on command but writing in an academic style and citing physical references for all my points was not something I enjoyed or had any interest in beyond that thesis.  In the way that worked for me, I put it off as long as I could, buckled down and wrote the bulk of it in a weekend (at the beach) and then spent a couple of months making it good enough to get the signatures of my committee members.  

I couldn't believe it when it was over.  I was thrilled.  I graduated and was already teaching part time at that institution while continuing in my full time graphic design job.  I immediately began applying for teaching jobs and waiting for someone to be interested in hiring me.  

That lasted 7 more years.  Every week I would scour the internet looking at a huge list of individual .edu websites for job postings.  Every week I'd apply for the jobs I was even remotely qualified to do.  This was back in the days of mailing actual applications too, so it was a bit of work.  

I'm not sure if you can imagine what it's like to apply for a fairly specific type of job for a total of 8 years and month after month, year after year get zero interest.  Every few weeks I'd get an email or sometimes a stamped letter with the word "unfortunately" in it.  And those were the nice ones, many places weren't even organized enough to send you the rejection letter.  7 years of rejections.  

This process was made a bit easier because I had a full time job.  It would have been much worse if I hadn't had that.  I feel sure I would have given up hope.  

It was the struggle that made the success worth appreciating.  I mean, can you even begin to imagine the hope and anxiety I felt when I got an interview?  The weeks of waiting on the decision to be made.  The happy dance I did when I got the job offer over the phone?  The long, anxious wait between that offer and the contract arriving in the mail?  

Even after signing the contract (and taking that cut in pay) I worried that the deal would somehow fall through before I arrived on campus to see that sign on my office with my name on it.  I had an official email address and had been looped into so many email conversations about the upcoming academic year and still I worried.  Was I smart enough?  Could I really teach these classes at this level?  Were they going to hate me at this new place?  Where would I live?  Where would my kids go to school?  How do I act at the new faculty afternoon social?  

Even when I saw the sign on my door, there was a voice in my head that corrected the sign and said that I wasn't a professor yet.  I was technically "Assistant Professor".  I didn't know if I'd be able to meet the requirements to be promoted to Associate Professor and eventually to Full Professor but that was still years away.  I decided to focus on each year, each semester, each class as it came.  

Slowly I discovered that "imposter syndrome" isn't really a thing.  That feeling of wondering if you can really do it, if you're really an artist, if you're really a teacher, if you can really do the job...that's just called being human.  The people who seem to just automatically assume they're smarter and more qualified than everyone else, those are the ones with a syndrome.  They're not normal.  They're also not smart.  No shade.  Ok, a little shade.

Good things may not come easy.  I can assure you that they will not come without a ton of help from the people in your life.  I can tell you stories about how many people who are not me are really responsible for me having this job.  Knowing you persevered and knowing you had people to help you will make your eventual success more satisfying.  

love, really

 

Last Thursday morning, a group of my students grabbed a stack of handwritten signs and stood out in the plaza as their peers hurried to their 9:30 classes.  They stood there, smiling, and holding signs that read “I love you”.  

I watched as students we didn’t know walked by.  Some paid no attention at all.  Some looked and called out “I love you too!” as they moved on.  Many others read the signs, tried to hold back a smile and continued walking.  

This has been on my mind for many reasons.  In the last few weeks, I’ve written several potential blog posts that have been fueled or at least inspired by the nonsense going on in our political and quasi-religious landscape.  Those writings have just been sitting around on my computer and the longer they sit, the less likely I am to post them publicly.  I hate politics and I don’t want to be one of those internet naggers whose posts you skip because you know they’ll leave you feeling more rage and unrest in an already stressful day.  But, dude, there’s something in this that just won’t leave my brain.  I may end up posting this one.

Those students stood there on Thursday with numb fingers from the cold and declared to every human that walked by that they were loved.  They didn’t just say they loved the art majors or the white people.  They didn’t just say they loved the ones who believed what they believed or used the old fashioned pronouns.  They stood there and said that they loved everyone.  

You know who’s not doing that these days?  Christians.  Ok, I’ll be nice and use quotation marks.  “Christians”.  There’s at least a large number of “Christians” who are supportive of declarations, votes and initiatives that treat other humans unfairly.  Pick your favorite one, there are some that single out trans people, some that single out the handicapped, some that single out non-white people, some that single out women and some that single out just about any group of non-male, non-straight, non-white people.  Pick an executive order.  Pick a hot-button topic.  Yes, this is politics on the surface, you’re right.  I understand that political parties will pick these “issues” to defend or deny and sadly, I’ve grown to expect as much.  My problem begins when “Christians” get involved.  

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it:  Love your neighbor as yourself.  All the law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  Matthew 22:37-40

I’ve seen Bible references used for all sorts of things, usually completely out of context and with no regard for the culture in which they were written.  But this one, spoken from the mouth of Jesus, seems to often be overlooked, along with the numerous other verses about loving others.  How we love other humans is directly tied to how we love God.  That’s not an interpretation of the quote, that’s what it says.  Everything else in our lives depends on love.  That’s what it says.  

If you call yourself a “Christian” then you believe  in the Imago Dei.  Your church doctrine says that you believe that humans were created in the image of God.  If you actually believe that humans were created in the image of God, you would never be ok with humans being treated unfairly and without love, respect and honor.  You would not be able to support taking away free meals from students to save money.  You would not be able to support non-citizens being shackled and put on planes to send them back to countries where their lives are in danger.  You would not be able to support laws that say humans don’t get to decide what happens to their own bodies.  If you believed in God, you would believe in love for everyone who walked by.  You would want all humans to be treated with the same love, kindness and respect.  

If your religion believes in tough love, conditional love and people needing to qualify to be loved, it is not Christianity.  Your religion is probably Capitalism and it will turn on you just as quickly as it turned on others.   

Oh, you came here for the art stuff?  Well, this is actually it.  Every work of art I create contains messages to help the people who see it.  Not certain people with an MFA or just the people who go into galleries.  It has always been important to me to create art for everyone at every level.  This is why public sculpture and murals are so important to me.  Public art has the ability to stand in a public place and hold that sign.  It has the power to let all humans know they are loved.

I invite you into a little self-reflection.  Would you be able to hold that sign and stand in a busy plaza and mean it?  Or do you really only have love for people who are like you?  

I’ll also invite you into a conversation.  If you believe you have a sound theological reason to support the dehumanizing that has recently been espoused by our government while also honoring God, I’d love to hear it.