HOW TO BECOME FAIRLY UNUSUAL (in twelve steps or less)

1. Grow up in the whitewashed backwater fields of Anytown, Ontario. Play with insects instead of dolls. Learn to draw before you learn to speak.
2. Become a glamourous creature of the night. Dress in black, paint your face as you would paint your canvas. Go to art school and poetry readings.
3. Decide that two dimensions and words on a page are not enough. Imagine your voice taking flight. Perform Dada plays to reclaim public space.
4. Grow unsatisfied with beauty. Become a wide-eyed idealist with radical politics.
5. Move to Toronto and go to university. Live with rats and cracks in your ceiling.
6. Study graphic design. Learn kerning + leading, Photoshop + HTML, image + meaning.
7. Also learn about maquiladoras, the Disappeared, and Third World revolutions. Find names for your ideologies.
8. Fall in and out of love. Repeatedly.
9. Watch world events unfold around you. Sometimes you take part, sometimes you simply observe. Feel small, and a little sad.
10. Read about Mayakovsky and Marinetti, Grapus and First Things First. Understand the transformative power of the Word, the Image...the ability of design to change the world.
11. Leave the relative safety of academia for The Real World (TM). Learn that living the dream doesn't come so easily, that this is just the beginning, that ideology must fuel you but never hold you back.
12. Keep loving, and hunger for more. Nothing else has stopped you yet.