Sketching at the mall

[avram]

Today was beautiful, sunny and warm, the kind of day that makes me think that winter might actually have gone for good (or at least for eight months or so). I was going to spend the day doing my taxes, but I wound up doing most of the work last night. At some point in the afternoon I realized that a lovely day was slipping past as I sat in front of the computer, so I headed out for a stroll.

I had vague notions of sitting in the Pavonia/Newport Starbucks (which has a great view of downtown Manhattan) and sketching, but the lines were long. I checked out the pier, looked at the yachts (one had a satellite dish; how can that stay fixed on the satellite when the boat is rocking on the water?), and eventually wound up having Mongolian barbecue in the mall’s food court.

The food court was pretty crowded, giving my plenty of sketching opportunities. The guy with the soul patch and glasses spotted me, and motioned me over when he saw I was leaving. He’s deaf, so we had to have our brief conversation in writing and gestures. He seemed pretty amused by my sketch of him, and gave me a thumbs-up. Like most deaf people who lost hearing too early to get a grip on spoken language (at least, that’s how it seems to me), he has really emphatic facial expressions and body language, a natural cartoonist’s reference, but they were too fleeting for me to capture on paper.

Comments

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Like most deaf people who lost hearing too early to get a grip on spoken language (at least, that’s how it seems to me), he has really emphatic facial expressions and body language,

Interesting way to put that. The emphatic facial expressions and bodylanguage are actually grammatical features of ASL.