Say "...anything"

posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 10:58 AM

For a while my son has been using a very interesting turn of phrase. In response to one of my typical questions such as "Whatcha doing?" his response is often "...anything.", which, taken out of context may not seem like it makes much sense. But, there is a very interesting and subtle way he has of saying it, like there is a little pause there before the "anything" part, which is the reason I added in the ellipses. There is something he purposely omits from the sentence and it could potentially carry a lot of different meanings, some of which we can actually get him to explain upon further questioning. For example, here are some things that "...anything" has meant in the past:

- "I'm not doing anything."
- "I'm not doing anything in particular."
- "I'm doing whatever I want to."
- "Oh, just anything."
- "I'm not telling what I am doing."
- "I'm not ready to tell you what I am doing, but I can tell you later."
- "I can do anything you want to do with me."

You get the idea. Incredibly versatile.

Recently this has popped into my mind numerous times as I am talking to people. I have been talking more to old friends recently about what I want to be doing in the future and, as part of gearing up for looking for a new job, the same question keeps coming up in conversations or as I am taking stock of my career path. It is a question that has come to mean a great deal to me as I like for where I am going as an artist, because on one hand I will be entering an area where I have little experience but on the other I carry along with me 15 years of experience in a very similar industry. "So, what does a Studio Manager do, anyways?" That's what I am during the day at work -- Studio Manager for the design group at a web site. It is a real amalgamation of many different jobs and, as such, it is hard to really explain (even to myself) what exactly it is that I do on a day-to-day basis. I mean, how does one describe anything and everything and nothing in particular all at once? On any given day I could be fire fighter, a traffic cop, a mind reader, a teacher, an accountant, a den mother, a ringmaster, a shepherd, an artist, a librarian, the A/V guy, anything that ends with "guy", master of small ball and junk time, or a mad scientist. Oh, and I know Photoshop... I know Photoshop really, really well. And all that stuff I just told you is about half of what I do, the other half of my time I am a web designer and I specialize in doing the kinds of things that nobody else in our group knows how to do, like building a complex custom scheduling system in Excel or creating actionscript for an interactive mix-and-match web shop. Basically, anything that nobody else can or wants to do... I do. The best way I have of measuring my success at work is if everyone goes home on time most days and we still get a ton of work done. I have done my job the best when other groups look at ours and say we are not working hard enough because we make it look so easy.

So, how do I sum that up? What is the answer to the question or "What do you do?"

I guess the best answer to that is "...anything."

Stay free

~shs