“I guess since butterfly therapist isn’t actually a real job, I’ll have to keep being a graphic designer instead.” She said with a nervous laugh. “I guess it’s really second best, though maybe- I mean I guess I could be a butterfly scientist. But I was never all that good at science. I like the idea of it. I even went to a science camp, but once it got past the meer love of nature I was lost.”
“I was once told,” I intoned with the best air I could, “that the tough part is that biology is actually chemistry, that chemistry is actually physics, physics is actually math and math is hard.”
She laughed. “Exactly! That was my point. I wanted to breed flowers and see what cool colors we could get. To look at stuff under a microscope. I didn’t need to know what elements made them up or how those elements were atoms in some structure.”
“I guess you would have been great a few hundred years ago.” I shrugged smiling.
“Absolutely. Problem is most universities don’t offer degrees in 18th century biology. Not a lot of research grants to discover things we already discovered either.”
“Can’t imagine there are, though if there are grants for medieval fashion history, 18th century biology isn’t really that much of a stretch.”
“True, true. Either Way my second love was drawing, so graphic designer it was.”
“Not a painter or something like that?”
She grinned and gave me a ‘ you really are clueless aren’t you, bless your heart’ look. “Na, I actually wanted a chance to make money. I guess I could have been an illustrator, but cartoons and comics were never my thing. That and the pretentious bullshit you have to put up with when you deal with artists. Good god almighty, fuck that. No way I could go to gallery openings and deal with those fucks all the time.”
“Yeah, everytime I talk to someone like that I come away with the profound feeling that either they’re an idiot, or that they understand the absurd nature of life so well that they can marinade in it and come out employed and cool.”
“Agreed, well marinated is a weird way of putting it, but agreed in principle if not word choice.” She laughed and I blushed.
“So what do you graphically design?” I asked trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to parry the awkward into the interesting.
She smiled at my odd word choice. “Website logos mostly. Someone, well more precisely someone rich, comes up with the idea for an app or a website or something that they’ll work on for three weeks then lose interest, they make the beginnings of the website, come to the conclusion it will all be a failure out the gate if it doesn’t have a cool logo, they hire me.
And you give them the cool logo.”
She paused, “Well, sort of, actually. Usually they are in the beginning stages of losing interest by the time I’m finished. So I get paid, it gets put up on a website that no one visits and is quickly forgotten about.”
“That’s sort of depressing.”
“Well, yes, I guess, but until butterfly therapy pays the bills, it’ll work.”
