Nothing much today

Didn’t do much today. Woke around 9:30 AM, meant to go to the gym, but I shut my eyes for just a few more minutes and opened them up again well past noon. This probably had something to do with having stayed up to 3 AM last night. Probably shouldn’t do that.

Had pizza for breakfast, voyaged into Manhattan, picked up a tube of permanent sap green acrylic paint. Winsor Newton, because I liked the sound of their pigment mix better than Liquitex’s, and didn’t you know that different manufacturers often use different mixes of pigments for paints that have the same name? I also got a new cheap Chinese brush.

Had an iced tea at Starbucks and did some lackluster sketching. Stopped off at Forbidden Planet and bought 4 Eyes #3, and now need to get hold of #1 and #2. These are anthology collections by a small group of Belgian cartoonists, and I can’t seem to get through to their website.

Did some grocery shopping on the way home, got a 100-bag box of Lipton teabags for $2, and realized that this means I can make iced tea for 16¢ per 16-oz serving, which beats the hell out of the $2 I paid at Starbucks for a big cup half-full of ice. (Though Starbucks has better air conditioning.)

Did a little painting this evening, but it didn’t quite work. I need to cut down some of that illustration board and try again with real transparent paints.

Why I need to update that graphic

OK, I’ve seen looks of stunned amazement on enough faces that I’m satisfied, and can clue the rest of y’all in. Last week I did something I’d been thinking about for months: I shaved my head. Why? Three reasons:

• Balding — It’s slowly going away on its own anyway. In recent years I’ve found myself combing my hair back over my head in a sort of front-to-back combover, and that can’t end well. I’ve been thinking of shaving it all off for a while now, but kept putting it off.
• Comfort — It was really amazingly hot last week, and is only a little less amazingly hot this week. All that hair really traps the heat, and I was getting tired of it. A fully bald head is really very comfortable.
• Courage — I realized a while back that I’m a very risk-averse person. I want to take more risks in my life (like embarking on a freelance artistic career), and I realized that if I couldn’t bring myself to take safe little risk like shaving my head, I’d never be able to face the tough stuff.

It seems to have gone pretty well. It took me about three days to get used to seeing my new self in mirrors and windows. Turns out I’ve got an enormous head, a grand, vast skull of the type commonly associated with evolutionarily advanced people from the distant future, or aliens who haven’t quite moved up to the glowing-ball-of-energy stage. The kind of head that’s supposed to come with an assortment of psychic powers against which your puny weapons are useless. Instead, it just makes it tough to find a hat that fits. I feel gypped.