My Top 12 List of Lessons Learned in 2009

January 1st, 2010

Happy New Year and like that! Here are the top twelve things I learned in 2009 that I thought to include on a list so named.

#12 I always thought a laptop was not “necessary equipment” for me, until I replaced my dead PowerBook with a 17-inch MacBook Pro.

#11 I believed that I did not want an all-in-one, that I needed a tower, that a PowerMac and not an iMac was my work solution—until my G5 PowerMac died and the quickest (read: affordably solution was an iMac).

#10 I was convinced that I wanted a 30-inch Apple Cinema Display and that a two-monitor solution was too geeky for me, until I set up the 24-inch iMac, disposed of the defunct G5 PowerMac, and decided it didn’t make sense to sell the 23-inch Cinema Display I had used with the G5 tower.

#9 Even though a desk may accommodate my two monitor solution and I am not a big, conscious watcher of television, it will occasionally drive me up a wall that the second monitor—the 23-inch Cinema Display on the left side of my desk—blocks my view of the kitchen television from my desk in my home-studio off the kitchen.

#8 I believed I had no use for an iPod until I was gifted one for my birthday in October, after remarking that I wanted one because—using the free TruPhone app and VoIP—the latest iPod Touch would function as a free iPhone.

#7 I thought the free iPhone thing was why I wanted an iPod Touch, until I began listening to music while I ran and especially when I used the stationary bike in paace of running outdoors in the cold.

#6 I was convinced that music and Twitter were more important reasons I need my iPod Touch the same way my wife and I need our cars, until I realized I somehow changed a password to one of my three email accounts, the non-business but all-encompassing, original one with the cable company that is my ISP.

#5 I never dreamed how Mac geeky my wife could become until the  iMac of her own that I got her around April of 2008 opened the door to her becoming a serious photographer who now works in Photoshop, exhibits in shows, became a member of PEN Women, and—essentially—became at least every bit (maybe more so) the artist that I am.

#4 I once again mistakenly assumed that I could reach a place in my freelance career doing book design and layout where promoting myself and actively seeking paying projects would cease to be all-important.

#3 I always figured that an external backup hard drive would prove my ultimately unnecessary fallback, working as part of my superstitious nature had proven what seems like a million times, by being an unnecessary expense since it guaranteed the opposite of what I prepared for, since my flash drive and CD backups provided enough protection until 2009.

#2 A serious downturn in the economy, the resulting contraction of businesses—especially publishers—would crush my efforts to become a serious and (okay, marginally) famous book designer.

#1 You have be somebody for the effort required to hack your website, blog, and Twitter identity to be worth the effort to some piece of shit (if you will kindly excuse my use of the scatological vernacular.

Entry Filed under: freelancing