So. Have you ever felt so useless you could just puke? Well, that's how I feel at my job these days. I work for web design company in New York City. We do sites of such caliber as "M&M's"® and "A&E"® and Jim Beam. The position I hold lives in a sort of hazy limbo, I'm neither designer nor art director. I am the illustrator. Once upon a time I had lots of stuff to do here, I was always busy, doing story boards or graphics. I even worked on a couple of sites that I designed from the ground up (sometimes more than once) which ended up, through no fault of my own, dead in the water. I used to crank out work, good work at a rapid pace. I was content, sort of. Slowly, silently, my work load trickled off. They hired more people - my work got thin. We got heavily into ad banners, animated ad banners, the kind with 14 frames of a really boring, repetitive message. Somehow, cause I'm so quick and efficient and do such darn good work, I got stuck doing this kind of thing. And lots of times I'm just sitting around, soaking up radiation in front of my glowing monitor, doing nothing. Well. To be quite frank, it sucks. It makes me really unhappy. When I get really unhappy, you can readily tell. I've always worn my heart on my sleeve. Lately I've been so sad. So tired. So ill at ease. So useless. So. What to do? I'm obviously not cut out to do this fulltime any longer. It'll be the creative death of me. I've been scouting out an artists' rep and working on my portfolio. I'm also going to have a promotional postcard printed up. I'm trying so hard to do what's right for me, you know? It's so hard when you have bills to pay, and no time to do what you love cause you're spending 9 hours a day being useless, by the time you get home you're too exhausted to even think of painting. God. If anyone knows the answer to this one let me know. I'll be forever greatful.