"Children"

This was my first printed full-color project long, long ago.  I labored over it.  I ran out of time before it felt finished.  What a waste of time.  I could do it better and faster now, but I remember my earnest effort back then and feel some compassion for my younger self.

I grouse about how kids today are too lazy to waste earnest time on completely pointless things like this, and I think about my current job and think about how I’m still wasting perfectly good time doing things that won’t matter in pursuit of a perfection that doesn’t exist.

Proof we did actual work in NH

I wrote a long blog yesterday that I didn’t post about my trip to New Hampshire this week, and it struck me boring – my recital of the trip anyway.  The trip was great.  My coworker Diane and I visited our software company, and we spent a lot of time pulling weeds in our database.  I wonder if I’m wasting the same kind of time as I did on this Prisma color black hole – yet at the same time the things I learned will be part of the tools I can use on the job later.  Sometimes we don’t see the fruits of our labor for, em, 30 years or so.

Diane next to the car we wished was our rental car

As for the trip, Diane is a pleasant travel partner, the software people are great, NH is a pretty state, and we even got enough free time to see the ocean in The Hamptons and visit Boston.  We even drove through Salem, but as far as I know we didn’t see any witches.  We didn’t see any famous people either, but we did get our fill on scenery.

We weren’t supposed to get this much free time, but the software company had an emergency and gave us an unexpected day off.  Woohoo!!  We walked all over historical Boston and saw all the main historical sites.  The weather was perfect and we felt like we were playing hooky.  It was the best work trip ever!

Boston -- the steeple is the Old North Church

I have an almost formed thought that there’s a lesson somewhere in this trip.  Like all that time I spent with Prisma colors, the free time Diane and I spent roaming around may turn out to be important.  When I was in college, I was killing myself on my homework every night while my teachers complained that I needed to loosen up.  One of my exbosses told me that if he wanted perfect, he would’ve hired a photographer.  It took years for me to see that a spontaneous blob of watercolor might be the thing that made a piece of art sing.  That my “style” came out in my unguarded moments, and that’s the stuff people actually like best.



USS Constitution, which is still an active Navy ship

I’ve often felt that if something comes too easily, it doesn’t count.  I’ve also seen that my laborious learning process pays off later, even if it isn’t obvious during my moments of self-flagellation.  Anyway, thoughts to ponder while I reminisce my way through New England’s major food groups, sun, sand, mountains in the distance, laughing kids at Paul Revere’s house, the cute boy with cupcake frosting smeared all over his face, and juggler Bob (as seen on TV!) making the kids laugh…

The Holocaust memorial is squished in a narrow median strip.  It seems simple, but facts and quotes are etched on towering glass squares, numbers Nazis tattooed on victims etched on glass reaching up to the sky.  Looking up the towers, it hit me how many it means when they say 6 million people died.  This simple-seeming monument struck me deeply.

  

Hi from Hampton Beach



Relaxed and happy - and thankful I packed a hat!



"Ocean"

What am I supposed to write about oceans?  My ocean is a Great Lake.  It’s not even the greatest of the Great Lakes, and has a bad reputation for pollution – though we’ve done wonders in cleaning it up since the Cuyahoga River caught fire back when.

I used to argue with my college roommate about ocean vs. lake.  She said I hadn’t lived until I’d seen the ocean.  I told her Lake Erie was better than the ocean.  It doesn’t have scary Linda-eating things living in it like the limitless depths of the ocean.  The lake is fresh water and you can’t see across it.  It has seagulls and waves.  We’ve got ocean-sized ships, and the Coast Guard protects us from unruly Canadians – okay, I’m pretty sure the Coast Guard’s main job is rescuing drunk boaters since Canadians seldom get unruly, but it is an international border.  What was different about the ocean, and why did I need to go?

One summer I went to the ocean, she went to the lake, and afterwards we both exclaimed enthusiastically about how right the other was about ocean vs. lake.  It just goes to show that we can have more joys and fewer prejudices the more we get out and live in the world.

When we look at the world from a narrow perspective, we might not be able to tell what we’re really seeing.  Is that the eyeball of something that would rip off your leg, or is it just a baby fish?

From an artistic point of view, sometimes we forget to let viewers figure things out on their own.  We don’t have to spell everything out.  It can be really boring when we do.  It’s like writing a murder mystery where the author tells you upfront who got killed by whom and why, and then you read the story.  Or maybe you tell someone the punch line of a joke, and then you tell the joke.  Okay, I’ve done that.  Telling jokes is harder for me than painting.

Sometimes the joy of living is being willing to see something from a different perspective.  One time I was having dinner with an extended family, one of whom I didn’t like very much.  He was one of those bombastic blowhards who eats all the mashed potatoes before anybody else gets a turn.  My buddy at the other end of the table took a different slant on the conversation, and just to be companionable, I took the other.  At some point, I said he had completely convinced me that he was right.  My buddy said “No, no, you’ve convinced me!” and we traded sides of the argument.  The mashed potato eater didn’t understand us at all.

Every argument has two sides, and there’s usually something worthwhile in each of those sides.  When we forget that, we dig in our heels and we don’t know how to find a common ground any more.

I’ll be the first to admit that I can be stubborn.  If I have an opinion, it’s usually because I’ve thought it over.  If I accept someone else’s opinion, then I have to do a lot of rewiring in my brain, and that seems like an awful lot of work when I thought I already had that issue settled.  It starts throwing in more questions about what is actually true, but it’s something we all ought to learn to do more often.  What if you took the other side of the argument?