Chores and Museum

Thursday, 2 April 1998

Today was a good, task-filled day. I got up nice and early and started my first set of Morning Pages -- that's a creativity-enhancing discipline that involves writing three pages about anything every morning. I read about it in a book that I didn't bother to buy, and whose name and author escape me. I don't know if it will accomplish anything, but it doesn't hurt to try. Just the discipline of writing every morning ought to have some positive benefit. I may also use it as a dream journal if I remember any dreams. (I rarely do.)

For breakfast: a grapefruit and a cup of tikuanyin tea. I've discovered that I like grapefruits. When I was a kid, and on one of the diets my mother kept pushing my to take up, I thought of grapefruits as diet food, something only made bearable by a coating of sugar. I suppose I still think of them as diet food, but now I like the taste, without any sugar. I eat them like oranges, peeling the rind off and then pulling apart the sections. Messy, but tasty.

After breakfast, laundry. We were past due for a sheet-and-towel washing. Way past due. Don't ask how much, it's embarassing. And revolting. But I did all the towels and half the sheets, because the full set of sheets was just too heavy to lug to the laundromat in one trip. I intend to finish the sheets off in the next few days, but I'll probably put it off until we really need fresh sheets again.

Then, off to the Brooklyn Museum to sketch some Rodin scupltures. See, my drawing skills have seriously deteriorated over the past most-of-a-decade since I burned out and pretty much stopped drawing. I figure that the best way to get them back up to par is to draw from live models like I did in school. Trouble is, that costs money, and though I think there must be places in the city where I can just sign up, pay a small fee, and draw a model, I don't know what they are. Then I realized: The museum only charges US$4 (and I can pay less if I can't afford that much) and has a well-known Rodin collection, and statues are much better at holding a pose than people are.

My attempts were pretty awful. There weren't any benches near the statues I wanted to draw, which was hard on my leg, and standing like that without an easel to support my pad is uncomfortable for me anyway. I made two abortive sketches, and there's only a small part of the second one where I think I was starting to get back some of the old juice.

But then, after wandering through the museum for a while, I went out into the sculpture garden, and sketched some of the fragments there, and was a bit more successful. I felt myself noticing details in the way that I used to. I did a page consisting mostly of drawings of the eyes of various different pieces. You can see one on this page; I scanned it onto a floppy the next time I was at Crossover.

I did some light shopping on the way home from the museum, and have lain about like a lump since.

I watched the new episode of Babylon 5 last night instead of the new episode of South Park, mostly because Comedy Central repeats South Park more times during the week than TNT does Babylon 5, so I have more confidence in my ability to catch up on what I missed this way. I can't say I'm impressed with Babylon 5's fifth season. The telepath plotline seems to have been moved along by characters (particularly Byron) acting more out of a sense of the dramatic than with any sort of intelligent strategy in mind. (Tell me if this sounds like a good strategy to you -- Step 1: Tell a bunch of politicians that you know all of their deepest, most embarassing secrets, and that you're going to reveal them if you don't get your way. Step 2: Lock yourself away practically incommunicado and go on hunger strike. Right.) And why are all humans subject to Earth law under the Alliance Constitution? Didn't Earth's colonies all break away two seasons ago? I can't imagine that Mars just happily joined back up again, what with having had a strong separatist movement even before martial law was declared and having been bombed by Earthforce.