Amazing art day [Wednesday 8]

It's 11.30 PM and I've finished pretty much every chore for the day which means I'm all set to go to bed within ten minutes of finishing this. In reverse chronological order, here's the things that happened to me today, here. we. go!

Got back at 8.45-ish, spent about half an hour watching The Circle with roommates, wrote something, went back to watching the show because roommates were freaking out about it watched some more, had some bread and bruscheta, watched some more, wrote some more, and then came into my room to write, read (the Genghis Khan book, really good read almost halfway through now), wrote a letter, did some basic catching-up, worked out, wrote some posts, read some more, and here we are now. Good day today since I did pretty much all the things I wrote in my checklist.

Got to the drawing place in Allston at 5.45. SS (Phd, Tufts) and JM were already there. Started drawing as soon as I went in. The theme for the night for JM and me was drawing SS's face. His face is quite distinctive very easy to reduce to basic shapes and do caricatures. I did a 'mixed interpretation' of sorts, drawing five different interpretations of his face with a message from him under each of those while JM did quite an amazing cartoony interpretation. JM did two major drawings, one with SS looking shy and one with him looking funny. SS drew portraits of JM and myself the ones he drew for me made me look like I was either a supervillain or a superhero. Our art instructor was really entertained by our approach I think -- she was such a fun and cool person -- and after pizza which was one of the best cheese Pizza I've had in recent memory and seltzer, we put our drawings for display for everyone to appreciate. Everyone did seem to have a fairly fun time looking at those. Now that we had done that, we were looking for other activities and we saw other instructions in the activity-sheet...One of the instructions involved doing a timed-draw aka doing the portraits in a minute, and then 30 seconds, and 15, and then 10, and then 5. We thought it was such a crazy concept so we first did a couple of portraits for a minute each and those worked out really well. Then we made a few more portrait within 30 seconds, and then 15 seconds. That was it for me since it was getting too stressful, but I encouraged the guys to keep going. I was timing them and they were doing portraits down to 10 and 5 seconds towards the end. I gave them several seconds to plan the portraits in their heads, plan out the strokes, their order and sketch and everything, and they did a lot better than expected. The 5/10 second portraits were amazing because at that point you really can't focus on minor details and have to summarize the faces with basic shapes and get down to that. JM was really good at that and reduced SS's face into perhaps 8 basic shapes a few dots and a squiggle or two which was really mindblowing. I liked it so much I showed it to the instructor at how good we had gotten at that and she even took a photo of it! I doubt she did it out of niceness she was genuinely excited by how much fun we were having and the learning we were doing. I think if nothing else, we showed her that her workshop had been successful. After that, we left the event, went to the Trader Joe's nearby to hide from the cold where a woman cut us in line and I bought a vegetable broth, we took the 66 bus to Harvard, Red line to Davis and I took 89 home while they did the 96 to their place.

Got to work at 9.20 which is a lot later than I've been doing lately. Had an apple first thing at work which did quite a lot to improve my mood in the morning. Did some productive work in the morning, ordered a kickass sandwich at subway because I was too lazy and cold to go out in the cold with the rest of my team and boyoboy I did enjoy that sandwich so much even though I do think it was not worth the money and left me a little empty still. Regardless, people should give Subway a second consideration though I still think their prices are not quite justifiable for how unfulfilling the subs are at least for the vegetarians. Regardless, a solid sandwich. After lunch was even more productive did some serious research and testing on new tools we're going to be using in our team. Stayed late at work talking to manager and coworkers, left at 5.05 ish which is also solid halfhour after I generally leave so things did balance out. Took green line to Park, Red Line to Central, then the bus 70 to Allston. TO go from Boston to Boston you have to make so many connections and go to Cambridge/Somerville, it's insane.

Got up at 7, was too lazy, got out of bed at 7.30 because still insufficient sleep, showered and got ready to go to work without the workouts. Realized it would be second day in a row and it wouldn't be so good for the discipline thing so spent some time doing workouts as well as getting caught up on the posts. Walked to Davis and got there at 8.35, by which the Red Line was so packed there was no place to stand which is justifiable, so glad my hours are a lot earlier generally. Listened to Office Ladies podcast as well as 20,000 hertz podcast on the way to work and at work in the morning. Which is also what I wrote about in the morning commute because it was such a good show. I'll be listening to a lot of it. I do need to widen my scope. I don't like that a lot of shows have so many guests, but it's a fine tradeoff and need to find the ideal combination of regular hosts and guest presenters.

And that was my day. good times, good friends, good fun. This is what my ideal ideal time would look like, such days once or twice or thrice a week every week all the time. Aaahh. One wishes. Goodnight all.