Today was cold and in the morning it rained. The fog of a dream I didn’t quite want to wake up from didn’t leave me all day. I was out of coffee. I whipped up some instant coffee I’d bought for the hurricane. With a lot of milk it wasn’t half bad, but my tiredness never went away. It went with me to drawing class, stealing my joy. The class, frankly, hasn’t quite been what I was hoping for. The other students like to play with various media, to play with shapes and squiggles. I want to learn how to draw the human form. Today I really wanted to learn how to do hands and feet. I wasn’t interested in dipping sticks in ink and doodling. I left class early and went for a walk. It was wet and the trees around the Menil looked like sad brown piles of coiled roots and branches. The Menil is about to close for a whole year for renovations. I contemplated going inside. Instead I went and had Vietnamese vermicelli noodles. Then I walked back to the Watercolor Society. Class was over and everyone was setting up for life drawing. I like life drawing better. It’s more useful to me. Today the model brought a mask. I liked that, but I couldn’t produce anything I was excited to show to anyone. So later, much later, at home, after cooking something healthy, after starting the dishwasher, after completing my dreaded annual review for work and emailing it, I sat down and drew a baby bird hatching out of an egg. It reminded me that birds are dinosaurs and that cheered me up, but just briefly. Tomorrow, I’m hoping, will be a better day.
