Rut

I’m in a rut. Rut, rut, rut. I can’t seem to get interested in anything, I just sit here wasting time in front of the computer all day, except when I occasionally go out and buy art supplies that I never seem to get around to doing anything interesting with. I need... I was going to say I need a smack in the head to snap me out of this, but I know too many people reading this who would take it with enthusiastic literalism. This isn’t being depressed, quite, it’s... My thoughts are chasing themselves around my head in circles. Images are flickering through my brain too quickly to get a fix on. I need something, but I don’t know what.

And tomorrow’s Saturday. One of the weird things about being unemployed is that it turns the week inside-out. Weekdays are when I can go out and travel the city, go to museums, see movies, whatever, knowing that as long as I avoid the subways around rush hour I won’t have to fight the crowds. Weekends are the days I want to stay at home, because everyone else is out.

Oh, wait...

Actually, I did have an image alight long enough for capture earlier, and even started to slap it down onto my new Fabriano Studio pad, sketching it out lightly in pencil and then outlining it in Higgins black waterproof Calligraphy ink with a Chinese reed dip pen preparatory to having some fun with my watercolors. First I needed to erase the pencil lines. Turns out that a really thick ink line can take much longer to dry than the thinner lines around it. Y’learn something new every day. I already knew that trying to erase a wet ink line was a bad idea, so that’s not a useful lesson.

Not fasting

Today I am obsessed with food and with watercolor pigments. (The “current music” item is an amusing coincidence.)

I decided not to fast. I weighed in at 285 (same as yesterday), which isn’t bad if I ignore Monday’s 284 reading as some kind of weird scale hiccup and note that I weighed 287 on Sunday. I ate too darn much yesterday when my parents took me out to dinner (the New Prospect Cafe on Flatbush, which is highly yummy, but too pricey for me to go there on my own), but not as much as I would have with my old, worse eating habits — I left about 40% of my meal on the plate after I realized that I was more than full.

So today’s goal was to eat nothing out of habit, to wait till I was really hungry. It’s gone pretty well. I didn’t get hungry till I’d been awake for a few hours (which is actually typical for me, after more than a year of waking up, going to the gym, showering and dressing, and then picking breakfast up on the way in to work) (God, I miss those days!), then had a cup of yogurt, and then later a nectarine.

I travelled into the city to pick up still more pads (hot-press watercolor paper, because I’ve decided not to fight my impulse to do fine pen work) and a cheap squirrel-hair brush at NY Central, and then over to the northern branch of Soho Art Materials (8th Street, just west of Fifth) for a tube of M. Graham sepia watercolor, because it makes such gorgeous mixes. I started to get hungry again walking towards Soho Art, passed an Au Bon Pain, and decided that I’d stop off there if I was still hungry after. So I got the sepia, and also a tube of gamboge, gave one of the clerks some advice (and Google keywords) about the paper she was working on (about evolution and the “intelligent design” movement — she was reading an article in US News and World Report, and it didn’t go into what I thought was adequate detail about the inherent dishonesty of the “intelligent design” folks, and how they’re actually out to overthrow all of secular materialism), and was still hungry. So I had a small bowl of broccoli-and-cheddar soup, a rosemary breadstick, and a cup of lemonade.

And that tube of gamboge (a yellow paint) turns out to be the single-pigment version — isoindolinone yellow, PY110 — which M. Graham stopped manufacturing last year, though they were the only commercial source. Cool! Maybe I should stock up. (Hm, looks like they’re still using PY110 in some of their paint mixes, like Hooker’s green, but not as a single-pigment paint.) I discovered this while researching my new purchases at the Handprint.com watercolor pages, the best source I’ve found on the ’Net for detailed information about watercolors. It also turns out that alizarin crimson, one of the two tubes of paint I got as free samples (dioxazine purple was the other) I got last year that turned me on to M. Graham’s paints, has atrocious lightfastness. I’m going to have to pick up some quinacidrone rose or something.

Back to food, I bought some ears of corn yesterday, planning to have it today with onion naan and pesto (a common meal from the days a few months back when I was losing weight more quickly), but now I’m not hungry, and if I get hungry will probably just have the cherries I picked up on the way home today (mmmm, cherries) or the grapes that’ve been sitting in my fridge since Tuesday. Tomorrow is barbecue day in Queens, so I probably won’t get to the corn till Monday.