how did we get here?

when I was in high school i was oriented in liberal arts because of my predilection and proficiency with languages. i was pretty much into grammar, composition. i would read books and find great interest in reading. though i had never been an avid reader, i would sometimes find myself immersed in books for such long periods of times that when i reached the end, it would be like stepping back into real world would be some type of a letdown. but since i was artistically minded and gifted, i used to draw so well that my teachers would take note, and one of them once offered my watercolors which got me an early initiation to painting. for some reason, i was fascinated with moviemaking and though i didn't understand the ins and outs of the trade, was dreaming of becoming a film maker some day. fast forward to my early years in photography. i had learned from a master that the best way to develop one's photographic style was to look at photographs. i would read all of the time life collection of photography books. i had almost a subscription to all the major photography magazines and would analyze pictures from the perspective of composition, lighting, color, everything. i would look at photographs so much that i developed an 'eye' for picture, some kinda way of 'reading' pictures. that was good for my photography education, but gradually i was losing interest in anything literature. over the years i would only read something that was related to photography or art in general. my interest and experience in photography got me a foot in the door when i landed a job in an advertising company. there, i learned two things: art stops where marketing begins. it was a hard knock. but i recovered. that teaching would come in handy in later years. second, seeing all the fantastic worlds that advertising and tv commercials were opening up, i discovered the wonders of special effects. i wanted to go to europe because, for now, forget photography, forget moviemaking, all i was fascinated with was 'flying saucers', 'submarines' and those hardly believable outworldly reality recreation that were done in the studio. in those days, the equipment needed to generate special effects were way beyond the reach of individuals, unless you were millionaire and has quite some schooling under your belt. i also discovered the macintosh. little wonder. fast forward new york, then columbus ohio. when in new york i visited the school of media arts. that was exactly what i wanted to do: tv production, specialization - special effects. that was a cool dream but where's the money. $9000 a semester seemed very lofty to me then. columbus ohio offered the opportunity to go to programming school. not too bad for someone who had interest in computers. after toiling for a few years and the initiation to dos and pc, i was all too happy to lay my hands on my first shiny new macintosh. i can't believe it now when i think that i shelled $2600 for just a box, no monitor - maybe with a mouse, no keyboard, no software except for the operating system. i saw a big box of quark xpress, 'how much?', '$649', 'can i get it?', 'sure'. now when i think about it, i wonder if i had been out of my mind. i had a pc using friend who did virtually everything she could to talk me out of buying a mac. 'mac people don't share software'. she had nearly $5000 worth of pc software - pagemaker, illustrator, etc... i don't even remember what software were in use those days. i started creating a few designs of my own; flyers, business cards and the like. when i first bought quark xpress, i thought that i could do everything with it. it was a big disappointment to learn that i could not create or edit images with it. photoshop was needed. price tag: $649. i was just appalled why software was costing that much money. since the world hadn't gone digital as it has nowadays, photoshop was only part of the equation. to see my pictures in print, i needed a scanner. after some magazine browsing, a couple of visits to computer stores and a few phone calls, i was lucky to find a scanner from b&h in new york for about $822, but it came along with a full version of photoshop 3.0. that was like two for the price of one. the cheapest that i could find in columbus would out me some $1200 sans photoshop, but only with a nondescript image editor. a few months later, i had illustrator 5.5, so i was now ready for business. i think that i have always been serious about business. when i was involved with photography, i didn't see it as much as a hobby, but i wanted to be a professional photographer. so i started my graphic design endeavors with intention of being a professional graphic designer. now i needed to advertise my new business. hard hard hard. though i was not getting my income from design, for the next two years i was very serious about it, and was getting good about it. at least so i thought then.