Tree Most Fair and Lovely

Off the Rails

Blind Justice

Though my intentions are clear in my sketches, the actual items and characters have yet to come exactly as I picture them (as Blind Justice knows all too well.) I wonder what level of artistry I'll need to envision something and transmit that exact conception to paper. Perhaps it is a matter of meditation. I admit I rush from idea to execution- So as not to procrastinate, and also because I don't want to be addicted to brain crack. As of now, I don't see how I could manage a daily blog any other way.

On the subjects of scheduling and of the sketch- I got called up for jury duty. I'm relieved, actually- I thought perhaps I missed a summons sometime, having never been called. My sister and mom, meanwhile, have been called up twice each in the past eight years. My concerns were compounded by the fact that when I went to renew my driver's license the clerk had so much trouble finding my information he asked me for my alias.

Looks like I'm a U.S. citizen after all, and one who will have to bike 10 miles to do her duty (as there is a note that says specifically that distance is not a hardship.) I could delay for a year, but now is probably as flexible as I will ever be so I figure I'll just go for it. My big consolation in all of this is that the Massachusetts Jury System Website looks like someone's 5th grade html project.

Malingering

Malingering is not exactly the subject of this monograph (references for nerds!) but it makes a good title. I thought the idea of a personified flowers cliched enough that I'd find a similar image by searching but apparently I'm more creative than I thought.

I have a warped perspective on my own wellness but I find the only thing stranger is other people's perception of me. The root of the problem is, no doubt, my usually feeling much more physically able than a 5 foot frame advertises. Admittedly, I'm a mess on paper- With lung conditions, hearing loss, and daily injections for three years (lest I have remained 4'8" for the rest of my life), I spent a great deal of my childhood in doctors' offices. So much so that I actually felt like there was a quota and I would not surpass it. When I was 15 I got a rash around my eyes about the same time that my right knee was incredibly sore. I was sent to a specialist who was convinced I had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. When she called for a follow up visit I refused to go. I was certain that it was a question of mind over matter and I was dead set against having another condition.

I never considered myself weak, maybe because compared to my sister I rarely got cold & flu as a kid. I knew some of my family thought my hearing loss made me deeply disabled (though I've never agreed with that assessment.) Still, when someone's response to my telling them I was training for the Boston Marathon was "You can't! You're too sick!" that was definitely news to me.

Now that I live with peers I am often told that I push myself too hard and, though I am usually recognized as strong and capable, people still worry about me breaking myself. I think anything I say about feeling poorly is whining, but I'm told don't malinger as often as I think I do, thank goodness.

The one thing that plagued me as a kid (and still does) is nausea. I get nauseous headaches entirely too often and, for whatever reason, they always feel like the end of the world. The big problem is their mercurial nature- they show up unannounced, fade away for just long enough that I try to resume my day and theeeeeen.... ebb back and make keeping my head above my shoulders almost impossible. It's the interruption of my plans more than the unpleasant symptoms that upsets me, and like four year old child I want to bury my face in a teddy bear until it goes away.

Mornings this week have routinely started with these headaches, making it hard for me to get out of the house. As a kind of reverse-hypochondriac I try to find comprehensive explanations for illnesses so I can strongly brush them aside. The running hypothesis is dehydration (eminently fixable!) and maybe the makings of barometric pressure-induced migraines (it always works to blame the weather!)

This sketch isn't my best work: Allow me to plead a "7" out of "10" in Ze Frank's brilliant 'Illness Communication Exaggeration Curve.' In case I ever aim to change my perception of self to that of a wilting violet, I'm going to need all the research and practice in malingering that I can get.

Oh! Oh my head...

The Pen is Mightier?

This simple sketch is the result of my contemplating what this blog is really all about. Pencil sketches are this blog's raison d'etre , but I wouldn't be using French phrases if I wasn't obsessed with expressing myself in words. 'Blog' is now a literary genre and my sketches are not enough to sustain themselves without my writing about them.

I can't discuss technique the way a trained artist could, and the sketch is not an illustration of the text (since the sequence of events is usually vague idea....sketch...logorrhea.) So how to define the relationship between the drawing and writing? In the absence of actual readership, the prattling I do in type is a kind of conversation with the sketch. Or, if the imaginary reader finds the writing inane, perhaps the sketch is the two-dimensional equivalent of "Look at the birdie!"

I'm devoting an entry to these disorganized thoughts because of the kind of medicinal or developmental quality that some people in my life attribute to my writing. They have this idea that a blog is a good excuse to write, that it is linguistic exercise, or that it is a kind of stretching that will make me limber enough for a writing-based career. If mediocre drawings are what bring me to the keyboard, then fine.

Maybe there is a kind of inevitability to my "being a writer," but as much as I like to succeed I really dislike hearing "I told you so." There is no doubt that writing with frequency makes one a better writer (albeit a more self-conscious one) but better writing is the only thing it guarantees. I want everyone to think more complexly about what it is to be a writer than being a character played by Sarah Jessica Parker and working for some branch of Conde Nast publications. Encouraging me to be a better writer is one thing, imagining my New York apartment is another. I value writing, and I'd love to infuse my writing with enough energy that it can propel me somewhere, but I hope you'll leave it to me to figure out where that somewhere is.

Which brings me back to the sketches. Writing is my way of talking about the way things are. I don't write fiction; the essay is my favorite form. All other tenses exist in my drawings- the ways things were, might, ought, shouldn't , can't, and will be. I don't expect to see them in a gallery, but that doesn't mean they aren't valuable to me. So if we talk about the blog let's talk about the sketches too- what I did, might, ought, shouldn't, can't, and will draw. And if they aren't worth talking about well, then... why not?

The Body in Conversation

The art of designing letters so that their shape (and not just the words they spell out) conveys information is "typography." The practice of representing shapes with words or phrases is a layer of meaning beyond that and, though it's something I've seen before, I cannot find a name for it.

As I've mentioned I really like sketches I can do with Sharpie marker because it ensures a kind of clarity of form and of idea. I'm really happy with with this sketch because it ended up being more layered than I originally intended. The sentence used to create the person (who is meant to be sitting in a lotus-type position) is "Who do you think you are?" but because of the fortuitous position of the letter "I" in THINK and the propensity of the backwards query to look like a "C" there are many other sentences that could be read including "Do you think I care?" and "Who do I think you are?" Suddenly we have not only a question but a conversation (although not an altogether pleasant conversation.)

Ultimately it's a sketch well worth squinting at, which pleases me. It's also a good reminder that having a creative idea is no substitute for executing one; the act of creating has bi-products that mere contemplation does not.

A Fresh Start

What Not to Wear

The Study of Bugs

I was on the phone with my sister the other day when, out of just about nowhere, the question of etymology vs. entomology came up. "Entomology is the one with the bugs, right?" she asked. And yes, she is absolutely right, which is why it is not poking fun at her to mention it here. She presumed that I, as the older sister with the literary bent, would know better and, in this case, I do... but only because I permanently learned the difference through embarrassment.

Once upon a time in high school I had a boyfriend (shock!) who was brilliant and of an equally bright (though less than modest) gene pool. He and his smart younger sister (aged 13 going on 47) were tightly bonded in a "Well, I-guess-it's-just-us-and-all-these-idiots" kinda way. I liked spending time at their place mostly because this family was altogether a lot more opinionated and politically aware than I was, which was the intellectual equivalent getting a (self-proclaimed) expert tour of places I'd only heard about.

I valued their judgments, is what I should say. What follows doesn't really deserve the prologue.

While the two siblings and I were making dinner at their place we were, for some forgotten reason, discussing Latin root words. Our conversation had hit that witty climax of laughter that leaves everyone sighing and waiting to see who will pick the next topic. And I, stirring something, breathed deeply and said contentedly "I just love entomology!"

The room went cold and I heard the sister guffaw as though, under arguably more normal teenaged circumstances, I was about to be schooled in the primacy of some pop star.

"Entomology" she articulated "is the study of bugs. You mean ETYmology." She cast an aged look to her brother that said clearly It seems we were wrong about this one. And he, to my dismay, started choking with laughter.

Of course bugs are ent, ENT. Like me, an ant held under a magnifying glass. Like entropy. Like the heat death I was currently experiencing in my little universe.

Yes, yes, at 16 I was shy enough to give myself an evening's inferiority complex over two letters corrected by a middle schooler. Pitié, pitié. Still, it's in my brain forever now, and it seems to me the distinction between the words comes up more often than the words themselves.

...And then I couldn't get the image of bugs reading books out of my head. So there you go.

P.S. Something much more devastating will need to happen to set me straight on climactic vs. climatic. I shudder to think what situation that might be.

The Longest Day

Despite a few conflicting internet opinions it looks like today IS the longest day of Boston's year (I'm going to trust timeanddate.com for this one.) This day is 15h 16m 49s and the sun rose at 5:08 am. This is not, surprisingly, the earliest the sun has risen this year- it was rising at 5:07 between June 10th and yesterday. As someone who feels most accomplished when waking before the the sun the summer is a disarming time of year. Early rising doesn't give the same sense of possessing the day.

Might as well sleep until noon.

Actually it will be a long day for me in every sense because I'm going to be working a gig tonight from 11 until (theoretically) 3 am. More likely we'll be done earlier and I'll get paid to bike home. Hooray for the 4 hour minimum! Also, the weather should be ideal while I'm biking, having cooled after the 8:25 sunset (see what I did just there?)

This was a sketch that intimidated me (water reflections? morning light? a city skyline?) but I'm pretty pleased with it. I invented a quick technique for creating randomized lighted windows (draw #checkerboards of lines in the box building outlines, color most of them in- assures the windows will be at the correct angles too. Spottiness in otherwise opaque coloring seems to suggest other lights or reflected light, or odd-shaped light from, say, a half-curtained window.)

My concern is that I don't think it's clear that it's meant to be a sunrise. Either the buildings shouldn't be so dark or the sun should not have risen so far. I'd also need more gradations in the sky. Maybe I should do sketch revisions sometime.

Four Walls

This is a stylized approximation of my room (which looks square here but, at second look, is really more rectangular.) That series of levels up top is a result of me realizing I'd drawn the box too large, taken it down, taken it down again, aaaaand liking the way it looked and keeping it.

Art.

I drew "my room" because I'm sitting contentedly in it, but no sketch, however simple or intricate, could capture the pleasure I get sometimes from just being in this, my own space.

The feeling is heightened if the room is clean and/or if I'm in particularly productive headspace (these factors usually go together, though the causality goes both ways.) The only trouble with this mood is that I will do whatever I can to extend it, which sometimes means rearranging, say, a flexible work schedule so that I can stay home and do things that had otherwise been languishing on my To Do list. Though this is ultimately not a good habit, and though I occasionally feel guilty for not doing whatever I had planned, so far it's yielded some pretty good results.

I'm lucky to be a person pleased by simple pleasures so I don't feel the need to say, chase chemical highs. Some of this is from former deprecation of these easy joys- If you had told me in childhood that I would have a personal space that I could organize how I liked, trash in the mania of a project, and then have the freedom to re-organize (each time knowing myself better and better preparing my belongings to serve me) I was so demoralized at times that I would not have believed you. But *sigh* here I am.

I am very happy to say that, in part by my wonderful landlords' request, I will get to enjoy these four walls (and their almost-as-awesome surrounding rooms) for another year.

Strange Bird

This is, oddly enough, no more or less than what the title suggests. I copied the shape of this bird from a graphic I saw in a magazine, but mine turned out a little less roundly stylized and a little more... realistic? Almost.

I don't know enough about advertising and graphic design to be able to name-drop styles the way that I would like, but the original magazine ad (though not my sketch) reminds me of the the ubiquitous Jet Blue ads. As it turns out those ads are created by a Boston- based company called Mullen. This ad agency seems to be doing everything "right" in the internet age in a very Hubspot Inbound Marketing kind of way. Funny how there's a kind of blueprint that makes you instantly recognizable as an up-to-the-minute establishment (it's all about that sidebar Twitter feed, really.)

Not that the birdie brands me as having any particular knack for creating ads, but looking at the Mullen website makes me wish I was working with other people creating images and getting paid to do it.

Catch

Definitely not the first person the call the Heart-in-a-Jar image to mind, although I did draw it without looking at other images and, as I did so, I was imagining catching a heart as one catches fireflies. That's not clear in the sketch, though. For that you'd need flying hearts.

The Mason jar's a little warped but at least the shine on the glass is pretty well-rendered. I've nothing more to say on it, really it's not so deep. Another example of something slightly sad and trite, perhaps, but we can't be all sunshine and exploding kittens all the time (though we try!)

Trite

If you do not believe that everything is improved by being on a stick I will need to refer you to a specialist. Also, if you Google "food is improved by putting it on a stick" you get "100 Best Companies for Working Moms."

Their search algorithm is all grown up, clearly.

I drew this because I often use "sunshine lollipops and rainbows" as an adjective or noun phrase when I feel like being a little snarky about something that is pretty nice (and usually trite.) In the little world of this blog the phrase itself is now trite from overuse, and it doesn't really help it's case to know it's a reference to this Lesley Gore song (a link perfectly safe for work except for the spectacle you may make of yourself while laughing at her sweater and her "dancing.")

As I write about Lesley Gore (a thing I do far more often than the average person) it's worth mentioning that I recently found out that she's gay. I am a little obsessed with this fact because of the way it turns her early 60's bubblegum pop offerings upside down - talk about refreshing all things trite! It's also nice to know I'm not the first person to find this worth mentioning- a character in the movie Grace of My Heart (all about music-making in the 60s) features a character based on her called Lilly Banquette (I find both this last name and "Gore" to be unfortunate, but her real name was Sue Goldstein so.... fire the Hollywood guy whose job it is to rebrand people.)

So anyway, the sketch. Just a quick thought I found it easy enough to immortalize. I like the nice clean lines of simple sketches I can do in sharpie marker. I'm the person who usually, when I'm looking for an online image, specifies that I want clip art. Possibly clip art guy is old enough now that he's gone from trite to retro.

Raining Somewhere

If I may be vain on one particular point- Do you see the circle that I drew freehand? I don't know that I will ever do that again so can we just marvel at that for a moment?
...
And we're back.

This is the image that came to me when I contemplated the question of whether it is always raining somewhere on the globe.

Although this is much debated on the internet, searching the query "Is it always raining somewhere?" with such helpful terms as "science," "national geographic," and "meteorological society" produces no authority greater than snopes.com .

So far, so sketchy.

The general consensus is that it IS always raining somewhere. This is thanks, in large part, to the intertropical continental zone which experiences, to quote NASA "an almost perpetual series of thunderstorms." Given so many places on earth with such a high likelihood of rain the odds against a moment's drought are combinatorically huge ("combinatorically" being a mathematical word I just learned that means, for my purposes, 'much larger than astronomically, and that's using MATH'.)

If you're feeling isolationist, you should know that the chances of a split-second dry spell in the US is also extraordinarily low, mostly because Mount Wai-'ale'ale on the island of Kauai, Hawaii has about 350 days of rain each year. As for the continental US, I leave you to figure that out. Call me when you need something circular drawn.

The Jumbonaut

Green-Eyed

Runtime Error

This program will compile, but when it runs you'll find you can't divide by "shoe."

I'm taking a C++ programming course (to no particular end) and trying to convince myself to allot much more time for it than I ever would have when I was in college. Generally, I would like to commit more time to fewer things as the summer goes on.

Like this mythical program just when I think I've sorted things out nicely I don't run. I mean literally I don't run- I do a full set of sit-ups to repeatedly reach the snooze button but I don't find my feet until it's too late even if running's the one thing I've promised myself I'll accomplish that day.

I could make some pun about the need to hack my life but I'm not going to make a fool out myself pretending like I'm that kid out of War Games. However, I do imagine the procedure to solve to most of my problems, time management among others, is the same as for creating computer code in Comp 11: Think in circles. Sit, glazed, for hours, punctuating this with failures borne of brief but furious trying. Allow the solution to slowly reveal itself before you. Feel both proud and stupid. Run the program.

Mod Squad

Ok, so the look isn't exactly mod, but then again there's a lot of debate about what that term actually means. TV's Mod Squad wasn't mod. For one thing, they weren't British and for another, they were too late (and too hippie.)

The dresses' plunging necklines and low hemlines take this a few blocks over from Carnaby street, perhaps, but still the moniker"Mod Squad" seems to stick to this image. Maybe in the sense that it could be modern art? Some faint echo of Andy Warhol? Maybe because the image is modular. It isn't terribly counter-cultural (unless it's subversively bald?) Would we call the dress 'sexy and streamlined?' If so, it may yet be mod.

This is actually an re-purposed sketch from when, several years ago now, I had the bright idea to do a to-scale drawing of myself and attempt to design clothes on it. You'll notice our friend Lefty is naked (reasons I'm single #811.) My own form, stunted and bald (and with an oversized head,) did not inspire me the way that costuming characters does, so I continue to fight with my wardrobe in all three dimensions.

I'm glad this sketch has found uses here as today's entry, as an excuse to probe the many meanings of 'mod', and as a rather grown-up game of "One of These Things is Not Like the Other."

Sketch of A Sketch of An Artist

This is me, although I have been informed it is "not cute enough" by a friend who, while flattering me, managed to disparage my craft. I should tell him to go hang out with the Asshole Zebra.

I kid my nice friend. I am merely a sketch of an artist, my art is not so all-consuming that I wouldn't rather be better looking in three dimensions than in two. Besides, I can hopefully get better at drawing myself (among drawing other things) but I cannot get a new face (at least not unless / until my sketches make me rich and famous.)

I kid my nice face.

Graph 0

Graph 0 is the first in what I hope will be several graphs in this project (inspiration willing.) It is my nod to the brilliant www.xkcd.com web comic. May I someday have ideas so brilliant that they can be declared by stick figures with perfect propriety.

You'll need to click the graph to see it better but it occurs to me the leveling line on the "Today" graph should be shaky, both to correctly chart the strange fluctuations in my mental state caused by sugar and to document the shaking of my hand as I finished the sketch along with the sweet dregs of the coffee.

More or Less the Same

Blank

I have still been sketching, although I haven't been posting. I've thought often about recommitting to this blog and realizing today was the anniversary of my first attempt, I decided to take advantage of that fact. The trouble was that I felt completely uninspired today. I was working in a store surrounded by very familiar and very dull things. My one thought was of a blank canvas, so that is what I drew. It wasn't until after it I'd drawn it that I realized the parallel I'd created to my first every entry, Blank Slate.

A blank canvas demands an artist, and it didn't take me long to figure out where ours is.

I don't think she's even dreaming of how to fill the whitespace. I think it's more likely she's relieved by blankness and needs it to sleep more soundly. As for "art"- we'll have to wait and see what she does if she wakes up.