Holy crap!

Someone has traded two Radiohead tickets for a three-story, four-bedroom house in Brooklyn's Park Slope! Behold the power of Craig's List!

Stupid LJmatch thing, after y'all have probably forgotten about it

OK, finally got that damn LJmatch thing to work. Results behind the cut.

( From 58% to 106%! )

As always with these things, some of the questions annoyed me. The first asked if I considered myself introspective or observant; I actually consider myself pretty darn both.

Another was this:

You're on the highway in heavy traffic. Which driving style most closely resembles yours?
( ) "See, I have this system, and if everyone followed it we'd all get there quicker..."
( ) "Look for openings and go."

I checked the first, because that is how I drive, and then I thought about it for a bit. This is a personality test, not a driving exam, and I don’t really drive that much. So I checked the second choice, because that’s how I walk.

Hello 260s!

The scale flashed 271 for half a second, then flicked to 269.5 and stayed there. Just to be sure, I allowed it to reset then weighed myself again. No flicker this time, just 269.5, steady.

(  Lower-body workout numbers  )

Five questions from Cadhla

This is the interview meme; for those two or three of you who might not have seen it yet, here’s how it works: Someone (cadhla in this case) asked me five questions, which I’m answering in my journal. If you want me to ask you five questions, ask me in a comment to this post; you then have to answer in your journal, and people can volunteer to have you ask them questions.

1. Pencil or pen?

Hm. Pen, most often, recently. Mostly because of the smearing problem with pencils I’ve talked about before; this is a big issue when you do most of your drawing in a travelling sketchbook. (Though that may be because I usually use very soft pencils; I tried out some 2Bs at Pearl yesterday, and liked ’em.)

A few years ago, when I decided to start drawing seriously again, I decided that I’d work on pen-and-ink and watercolor, the two media that, in my experience, are the most difficult and unforgiving. It’s done me some good. A decade ago, sketching people in pen on the subway would have seemed an impossible task; now it’s almost routine.

Part of the change is that I’m using a very fine pen; this lets me use a sketchy style, making several lines and then emphasizing the one I like, a technique I first learned with ballpoint at SVA, in Jerry Moriarty’s “Draw Anything — Especially From Your Head” class. (Well, I’d know it before, I used to doodle in ballpoint in high school, but that was where I actually was encouraged to use it.)

2. When did you realize you liked to draw?

When I was a kid, my family used to summer in a bungalow colony in the Adirondaks (Terra Alta, on the shore of Schroon Lake). There was another kid there, I’ve long forgotten his name, who had this fictional world going where these two space fleets were battling each other, and he’d draw the battles. Crude stuff, mostly stick figures, ’cause hey, he was young, but it struck me as amazingly cool, so I started doing it too. I wound up going off in entirely different directions, since I liked drawing aliens and monsters.

Hm. I must have liked drawing before then, because I can remember doing a drawing in second grade that was pretty good (by second grade standards), and doing drawings of weird dinosaurs in kindergarten. But I don’t think I consciously realized it at that point.

3. Do you prefer winter or summer?

Arg. I pretty much hate both; I’d like to even out the Earth’s axial tilt so it’s just spring-fall all year long. This is part of why I think I’d like living in the Pacific Northwest.

If I had to pick, I’d prefer summer, though that’s because we’ve just been through a brutal, multiple-blizzard winter. If you’d asked me last August you might have gotten the other answer.

4. What do people most often misinterpret about you?

I really don’t know, because I don’t often get told about it. I think women I find attractive often think I’m not interested in them, because I’m really bad about making the first move, and have this tendency to treat women as if they’re people rather than targets of sexual desire. I was once told, by someone who claimed she was interested in me (at a time when we both had other partners) that she hadn’t made the first move because she’d thought I was asexual, like Zonker Harris.

5. What would you change about yourself?

An easy one! My body — less fat, more muscle. I’m working on it.

Other than that, I’d like to be more decisive. I tend to over-analyze things to a truly ridiculous degree.