Messing around, thinking about work occasionally but not actually doing much.

I had a little episode of road rage on the way home Wednesday night. Nothing extreme, but enough, I decided to justify stopping to spend a little money on the way home. (Why is it that every time I go to read a book series, I wind up searching the planet for Book 3?) A mere $24.00 later, I was happy again. You don't realize how much of your life revolves around shopping and eating until you go on a diet and a program of Fiscal Austerity at the same time.

Haven't done any writing for a few days. Not since the (ahem) Little Episode on Monday. I thought it might be wiser to let those associations fade away before I approach that poor story again.

I've been frittering away the work hours practicing my sketching instead. Hands, I should mention, are very difficult. (This book offers an odd selection of things to work on, but that may be because the primary focus is perspective. So, they offer feet and hands but no other body parts. Feet are simple...you just put shoes on them. Hands are another story entirely.)

The R. C. provided a picture she'd like turned into a sketch, which is very flattering of her, if wildly optimistic. I did a quick trial and estimate that I might, might be able to produce a reasonable...well, recognizable anyhow, facsimile of that picture in two or three months. Maybe. There's a lot of amorphous vegetation that I haven't figured out how to handle yet.

Still. It's not like I had anything else I was dying to draw, is it? At least now I have a place to focus. I can learn to draw the disparate elements of the picture individually, then try to learn to put them together. (Overlapping things is a whole 'nother problem.) Today I brought in my instructions on "texturing". Not exciting stuff, but necessary.

Once I'd worked my way through the one drawing book that I liked, I just went on-line and searched for how-to stuff on sketching and drawing. I printed out a bunch of stuff. I love the internet.

Okay...enough about that.

Because this is the Year Of Doing Things Different*, the R.C. and I are signing up for Open University classes this fall.

She had her first one last night, a class on diet and nutrition and women's bodies and depression (or something like that).

One thing you have to do, going into a class like that, is remember that everyone has their axe to grind and their pet project to promote. This bunch was down on refined sugar (well, who isn't?) and big on Cave Fare. That is, at least one of them thought the problem with modern diets was that we aren't eating the way cavemen did. All raw foods and not much of them.

That fact that we don't all have the resources to bring down our own mastodons three times a day doesn't seem to have entered into the discussion, although they did advise shopping at health food stores and eating all natural, organic type of stuff. Which I agree with up to a point, but not everyone can afford to pay the premium for organic food.

It's all very well for people who can afford it to get all pretentious about eating "natural" food (as though the environment it was raised in is somehow unconnected from the rest of our polluted planet) I guess. And for those of us who have a Whole Foods opening across the street from where we live in a month. I think it's important for us to remember, though, that the several billion people living on this planet can't be fed using hunter-gatherer techniques.

Whatever.

(Also, they don't approve of modern food processes because pesticides and antibiotics aren't how the cave men ate. I think it's important to establish at this point that I'm not eating wormy apples or buggy tomatoes, no matter what some prehistoric woman was prepared to tolerate in her diet. And that's final.)

Granted I accept that we, as a society, tend to over-eat, but not everyone is capable of digesting seven or eight cups of raw fruits and vegetables in a day, you know? For those of us concerned because today's produce isn't as vitamin-filled as the stuff our ancestors ate (the worms add protein, I guess) this woman offered a handy-dandy pill with all of the nutrients necessary to replace a full day's vegetable and fruit allotment.

No word on what cave men thought about taking pills and no information on whether or not your body can actually absorb 100% of your day's nutrition at one go or not.

The same group offers consultations on nutrition and menopause. All about natural "equivalents" for HRT and stuff.

The first person who tries to take my hormone pills away is getting a psychotic episode in the face.

The R.C. was more adventurous in her class choices than I was. She signed up for a lot of self-improvements sorts of things.

Me, I spent five years working at a company who considered every employee a fixer-upper project in process and even though that was ten years ago, I'm still pretty much over it. (Yeah, I learned a lot, worked through many of my 'issues' and came out the other side a better, more productive employee, but there's a limit even to my narcissism and five years pondering the constantly fluctuating state of my own navel was enough.)

I looked at all the courses that might actually help me in the job market (assuming unemployment visits me again) but they all looked too much like work.

I pondered, long and hard, over a writing class, but as the R.C. pointed out, every time I sit down to learn about writing, I write less (and worse). Now that I'm pretty much done with the politiblogging thing, as a daily obsession, I'm hoping the old creative juices start to flow back into story-writing tracks.

In the meantime, I'm not putting any pressure on myself. Which is why the drawing binge. It's tangentially creative, but not connected to writing. I suck at it and I'm okay with that, so there's no pressure to blossom into the next Rembrandt. The tools are minimal, all I need is a pencil, an eraser, and a bit of paper. I can play with it at work or wherever I am.

Today, for instance, we began by trying to copy a sketch of a cat. My first effort looked unsettling like Yoda tripping on a couple of tabs. My second effort, the same, but with indigestion added. By #4, I'd graduated to "Yoda in a police line-up" but my fifth effort bore, if you squinted and tilted your head a bit, a distinct resemblance to a cat. I considered this a triumph.

Okay...and now I'm humiliated.

Moe strolled into the office to ask about Work Stuff and the sketchbook was open on my desk. He looked at the drawings!

Now I need a new hobby.

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* We occasionally tend toward Theme Years. Once, we had Year Of Public Transportation, for instance. We had Year Of Getting Thinner when we went on the diet. Talked about nothing for six months except the food we weren't eating. Personally, I'd like to try Year Of Gourmet Dining, but the R.C.'s non-caveman body is suspicious of new and strange foods and anyhow there's this whole diet thing again.