AT THE STOA

I used to draw when I was younger, and I found that I'm equally mediocre in all the mediums I fiddled around with - pencil, charcoal, acrylic paint.  I never really practically understood the skills it took to imagine in well-rounded three dimensions, so even though I shade and highlight using whatever medium, the things I draw inevitably end up like two-dimensional things badly pretending to have shadows and depth.  Something told me that if I were to deliberately stylize my drawings to just two-dimensional things, I would end up drawing just lines and dots.  If, however, I were to do abstract, I would end up doing something concretely incomprehensible. It also didn't help that I did not have shading skills, and that I purposefully choose the types of the mediums that require artistic chops to begin with.  For instance, I insisted on using mechanical pencils for sketching, so I end up straining my wrists repeating inevitably gossamer strokes just to produce what l...

After tutoring unsuspecting students the entire Saturday morning, Pasco and I went out for a drive.  (By that I mean, once again, that he drove and I just happened to be out with him, and it also just happened to be Valentine's day.)  We didn't really plan on going out as a celebration of it, we just happened to be going out, just happened to pass by the restaurant we've been wondering about for months (for the place was always full), and just happened to go in, and later on proceeded to massacre all the food that just happened to be on our table. The food was massacre-worthy: the croquettes were deceptively filling, the steak superb, and the buffalo wings made us hiss inwardly.  We briefly speculated about its hotness level in the Scoville scale, and concluded that it would be relatively low, since those on top would presumably kill anybody susceptible to heart attack.  Still, it did clear my sinuses, and after eating all we could we enjoyed the brief food c...