{"id":99,"date":"2009-03-03T09:22:46","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T09:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=99"},"modified":"2009-03-03T09:22:46","modified_gmt":"2009-03-03T09:22:46","slug":"path_of_least_resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2009\/03\/path_of_least_resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Path of Least Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"display: inline;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"frenchbread.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/frenchbread.jpg\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"margin: 0pt 0pt 20px 20px; float: right;\" height=\"166\" width=\"250\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p>On Sunday afternoons for the past few weeks, I&#8217;ve been taking a class at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baltimoreclayworks.org\/home\/index.html\">Baltimore Clayworks<\/a>. Spinning bowls out of mud has turned out to be far more challenging than a person who has seen <i>Ghost<\/i> might expect it to be. When another young woman pulled out her much advanced vase work, I had that same exciting\/overwhelming realization I had when I was 8 and about 6 months into violin lessons: If this was going to happen, it was going to be a long, hard road. <\/p>\n<p>But at 31 years old, this felt like a much more daunting proposition. Committing years to educating myself on any topic seemed too audacious, and&#8211;Yikes!&#8211;did I just type that? Even if it took me 12 years to master clay as it did the violin (as much as I was going to personally master the instrument, I mean), at 43 I hope I&#8217;d still have quite a few years of coffee mug production in me to make it worth the while. <\/p>\n<p>My college career was brief, and though sometimes I still wish I&#8217;d stuck around in academia longer, I really can&#8217;t see going back to formal study at this point. But I&#8217;d like to think I&#8217;m still hungry to learn and capable of committing myself to projects that require serous intellectual investment. If that&#8217;s going to happen, though, I&#8217;m probably going to have to start by learning to stop thinking that I&#8217;m too old for anything but short cuts.<\/p>\n<p>**No Knead French bread: Most of the quality, 1\/4 of the energy. Maybe this is where the bad influence comes from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Sunday afternoons for the past few weeks, I&#8217;ve been taking a class at Baltimore Clayworks. Spinning bowls out of mud has turned out to be far more challenging than a person who has seen Ghost might expect it to be. When another young woman pulled out her much advanced vase work, I had that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-99","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}