Drawing grows braincells that don't talk to me...

Drawing is, I believe, an essential life skill, and that I regularly let it go fallow bothers me. But every time I take up the pencil again, I get this weird, hesitant emotional response to the act of illustration.

I realized the other day why learning to draw bothers me. It's because the brain cells that drawing forces to grow and mature don't talk to me.

I've known a few other geeks like me: the kind of people who, when they learn something deeply interesting and profound, can feel the brain re-arranging itself. It might just be the prickles of our scalps responding to the deeply intellectual challenge of understanding something complex, like a new level of set theory or grasping functional programming, but it's a validation that the process is working, it's a sensation I've learned to really enjoy-- even though it hurts the way exercise hurts-- and at the end, I can express myself better.

Programming and mathematics are forms of human expression. They allow us to say things we couldn't say any other way. The constant emergence of new programming languages is part of the process of looking for new and better ways to say the stuff we programmers want to say. The uplift to functional programs-- programs that get away from the muck of how we express things and more clearly express what we want to say-- has been a huge leap.

But all of these skills are verbal skills. We may have symbols like '@' and '>>=', but we use words like 'at' and 'bind' to communicate with each other and ourselves. We can label them. Their meaning may be more subtle than that, may be contextual, but at least they have labels.

Even music starts off with labels, at least the way I come at it: clefs and staffs and notes and bars. I realized, watching a jazz trumpeter do his thing the other night, that he had gone past the labels and was communicating through his instrument what he wanted to say at that moment, but talking to him afterward, even he admitted that it started with symbols, with the clefs and staffs and such.

Drawing has none of that.

Oh, sure, you can start with ball-and-stick, mannequin, perspective lines, but even the most rudimentary drawing requires skills that have absolutely zero verbal components. You can't even let the words get in the way: that's what classes like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain are all about: getting the words out of the way. And since I can't talk to that part of my brain, since it doesn't talk back in the verbal way with which my very noisy brain is familiar, it bothers me.

I think I should explore that further.

"What would you do if money was no object?"

If money was no object, I'd spend my day writing pretty stories about people finding love and sex, and writing beautiful software to make those stories available to the widest audience available, and creating beautiful illustrations to make those stories and that software vivid and enjoyable.

Weekendy stuff: It does not suck to be me

It was a pretty nice weekend. Not much happened Friday, blissfully. Saturday there was much too-ing and fro-ing as we made sure Kouryou-chan got to her dance classes on time. I spent most of the weekend either working on a story or teaching myself the inner mysteries of ANSI 2003 SQL (with PostgreSQL extensions), all the while cleaning the exterior with the power-washer. Did you know my house actually has a deck under all that moss and mildew?

Kouryou-chan had an overnight with two friends, to spend most of it drawing, so Omaha and I went out to Mashiko's for dinner, having a meal filled with sashimi and sushi and sake, all of which was utterly wonderful. We sat at the bar and talked to Hajime's second, a delightful woman who seemed pleased to discuss with us her work.

We then went to the symphony. It was a pops performance of Cotton Club hits, with an amazing male trumpet soloist / vocalist, a female vocalist, and a male dancer who very obviously patterned his career on Sammy Davis Jr. There were funny comedy bits, amazing songs, and great power, as well as instrumental hits that brought the house down. There was a great Q&A with the conductor and the soloist later, and I learned that for every orchestral job that opens in the US every year, a hundred kids graduate from music school. Where do the other 99 get jobs?

Sunday was quieter. We ran a few errands, then went for a bicycle ride along the Green River. It was just eight miles, but it showed that our bikes are in good shape, as are we.

Omaha had an event that evening, so it was just Kouryou-chan and I at home. I cooked hot dogs on the grill and had potato salad made with baked potatoes, hard boiled eggs, sour cream and bacon bits. I sat on my newly cleaned porch, drank wine, wrote code, and enjoyed the new sound system I'd gotten for my birthday. It does not suck to be me.