I came across this piece of writing which I don’t think I’ve ever posted anywhere publicly. It’s one of my favorite stories, tho, so here it is for you guys.
My brother is an architect and designer. His entire life he’s had an amazing ability to draw just about anything with stupendous detail. He’s also able to disassemble shit and put it back together again with ease – he just SEES things so clearly, and is able to translate that vision from his brains to his hands.
Me, not so much.
In fact you might say my abilities in both of these areas is, ah… impractical, at best. I’m not bad at taking things apart, but it’s 6-5 odds against my getting them back together again and functioning properly. My limitations in this regard led to my two Theorems of the Conservation of Stuff:
1) If you take something apart and put it back together again, you will always leave one piece out, but the thing will still continue to function perfectly normally.
It should be noted that, through repeated practical application of this theory, you can take a thing apart and put it back together enough times such that it will no longer have anything in it at all, and yet it will still continue to function perfectly normally.
2) If you unpack a suitcase and repack it, there’s always one thing which just won’t go back in no matter what you do.
It should be noted that, through repeated practical application of this theory, you can unpack a suitcase and repack it enough times such that it will be completely empty, and yet you cannot pack anything into it at all.
It was my failure to master any sort of artistic endeavor, perhaps, that led me into the computer sciences. No drawing required, and my ability to translate what I’m THINKING from my head to my hands appears relatively intact. Couple this with a keen tendency to focus an unholy amount of attention on one thing at a time, and it makes for a good coder, and, later in life, a good systems designer. But it does NOT make one any better at drawing. And, being as I’ve always admired my brother for this ability of his, I decided, in my senior year of college, to attempt to better myself in this regard. For all intents and purposes, we will call the class I attended “Drawing For Complete Morons”.
I was actually very excited to purchase the required materials for DFCM. Pens! Pencils! Charcoals! Gigantic Paper Pads! Fixatives! I felt as if an entire new world was opening up, with an arcane language all its own, and I was going to be indoctrinated into a cult of magic practitioners. No longer would I bear the shame of my overly developed left-brain-hemisphere – I was going become an arTEEST! Take THAT, Pascal! Kernighan and Ritchie can kiss my ass, thank god almighty, free at last! And so I arrive at the very first session of DFCM, backpack bristling with the implementations of my upcoming transmogrification. I am ready for anything.
The first thing I realize is that nobody else has brought anything but a few pencils and a Gigantic Paper Pad. I don’t feel too badly about this, as I’m a total, complete philistine, and I know going in I’m starting with nothing – anything I do wrong I’m going to chalk up to this and keep forging ahead. I plotz myself down and try very hard to affect the extreme, almost pathological indifference everyone else in the class seems to manage effortlessly, but I’m so excited that I keep breaking into smiles, all the while looking around at different people, not wanting to catch their eye, trying to figure out their major. After ten minutes of what seemed to me to be an unbearable buildup, the professor finally arrived, and he’s got with him an enormous box of, of… of STUFF : kitchen utensils, dinnerware, handheld yard tools, and the like.
At this point I experience my first real pang of discomfort. Holy crap, I can’t even draw with a pencil and you want me to try to compose something with an EGG BEATER? Have you lost your fucking MIND, man? What am I gonna do, fucking make you an omelet that looks like the Mona Lisa?
But no, the idea, as the professor explains, is simple. Pick whichever of these things speaks to you. Pick whichever implement you have with you that you like, and do your best to draw it. All I want to do today is to see where everyone is, so I know how to structure the class. Well, shit! That seems perfectly reasonable, let’s get to it then! I expect there to be a mad dash to the box, as there would have been had you thrown the same challenge to a room full of CompSci majors for whom social skills are not particularly manifest, but everyone is well behaved instead, bordering on that disinterest that fascinates me so.
It is at this point that my left-brain-hemisphere starts to assert itself : I don’t want to tip my hand, as it were. I know I suck, but I don’t want EVERYONE to know that I suck. So I need to pick an implement which isn’t going to be impossible for me to draw, which isn’t also something imbecilic like a straw, but that might give me some small chance at showing that I do indeed have some untapped genius simply waiting for the right small appliance to come along to allow it to reveal itself to the world. The guy in front of me picks the egg beater (show off), I pick something that looks like a long handled colander in miniature, or an enormous tea strainer, with a leather thong tied to the end of it, presumably for hanging. Not too complicated of a device, I think to myself, I should be able to manage this. So I sit down and begin to sketch.
The pad I’m drawing on is quite large, 18×24, so this is going to be, by a considerable margin, the biggest drawing I’ve ever attempted. My enormous tea strainer is nothing like as large as the pad, so right away I’m experiencing difficulty getting the scale right. First the handle is too long for the size of the strainer part (wad up, throw away). Next the strainer part is gigantic and I don’t have enough space for the handle (tear up, throw away). Then I get the bright idea of starting in the middle, but that also ends poorly (tear up, wad up, throw away). Forty five minutes into a ninety minute class and I’ve got nothing to show.
The fucker next to me, meanwhile, has loosely sketched about the most beautiful god damn garden trowel I have ever seen. He’s using a pencil, but he’s got so many shades of grey I can’t believe he’s not cheating somehow. The fucking REAL TROWEL doesn’t look as real as the one that’s on the page. This is when I get my second pang of discomfort. There is no way this ends well for me. It is at this moment that the professor starts to stroll around the room, starting, thankfully, on the other side, to see how we’re doing. So now I’ve got to really start humping it.
As the professor slowly wends his way around the room, I just totally disconnect my left brain. I remember a quote about something or another that says to make a statue of a horse, cut everything away from the block that doesn’t look like a horse. I’m not sure how it applies to my current situation as I’ve no scissors, but it makes me feel better. I calm down, and begin to sketch.
The professor alights behind the guy next to me, pauses for a moment, and breathes “Very nice!” But me, I’m focused, a drawing machine, totally In The Moment. I barely register the professor standing behind me for what must be at least a minute. And then I hear it, at last, the affirmation I have sought my entire life:
“What are you DOING?!”
The tones are unmistakably horror-struck, bordering on hysteria. Left-brain-hemisphere takes total control again, and I snap out of my trance and see what I have done. What I see is, without question or fear of contradiction, a gigantic penis, caught in the act of ejaculating.
This isn’t to say I meant to draw a gigantic penis. I MEANT to draw the little-big tea strainer. But picture it : I have a large, mostly round bulbous thing with scribbled lines which are meant to be the strainer net but instead looks like pubic hairs. Attached to this I have a large handle with knobby bit at the end onto which the leather thong is attached, only it looks like… well, it looks like a gigantic penis with a bulbous (circumcised) head with a little hole at the end, and out of the hole is shooting a liquid of some sort. And given the painfully tumescent condition of the handle, with regard to the over all scale of the thing, it is not likely to be urinating. No man I ever knew could urinate under that particular circumstance.
“I,” I respond, “have drawn what appears to be a gigantic penis. I swear to you I’m trying to draw this tea strainer thing here, I’m just… just… I’m really awful.”
“Well,” says the professor, “At least you know it. How could you improve this drawing?”
Left-brain-hemisphere starts talking, then, and I can’t shut it up. I don’t even try.
“Well, aside from it’s a gigantic penis, it’s just all out of proportion. Nothing is the right size. And I can’t draw a perfect circle so the strainer rim looks all wrong. And I tried to get the little ridge at the end of the handle but then made the two sides of handle on either side of the ridge different sizes. And then there’s this business with the actual strainer material, which I didn’t have the first idea how to manage so I tried to sort of abstract it out, otherwise it would have, if you can believe it, looked even worse. I’m afraid I can’t explain the leather thong at all.”
The professor nods, thinking to himself for a moment – I’m pretty sure he’s trying very hard not to laugh. I, on the other hand, am trying very hard not to cry. ”Well, at least you can SEE what’s wrong, and that’s a good start.”
“Am I allowed to burn it?” I ask
“Not in here,” he says, and walks on.
I never went back to that class. I went directly from the doorway to the registrar and dropped a class for the first and only time in my entire life. I NEVER give up on an academic subject, but in this case it was clear to me that I should circle the wagons right away, circle tightly around the wounded little animal comprising my right-brain-hemisphere, quivering with embarrassment and shame. I avoided that building for the rest of the semester.
To this day I am a miserable drawer-of-things. I stand in complete awe of people who are really good at it – the entire process is an utter and complete mystery to me. If you want a new distributed security system designed and implemented from the ground up, I’m your guy. Just don’t ask me to try and draw a picture of it for you. We will both be sorry.
