R. Leib's Blog: Dream State - Posts Tagged "r-leib"

I drew the caricature representing me on Goodreads. It is how I looked about 20 years ago. I look pretty much the same today, just a lot grayer. I worked out a trick to drawing caricatures. I take a photograph and trace the lines of the face in black with a paint program. (This is similar to camera obscura that artists like Vermeer used.) It gives me a crude start to the image that has the facial characteristics in the right forms and relationships. (Getting the forms and relationships right is what makes a caricature look like the person.) Then I work on refining the lines and adding shading. The impression of the person can be lost in too much detail. A caricature is best, when the subject is represented by just enough.

Sometimes. I'm not fond of getting haircuts. So I get one a year at the start of summer. By that time, it is that long. I think the ladies at the place where I get it cut consider me a challenge. In any case, they seem really happy to see me.

I never needed glasses, when I was younger. I had 25/20 vision, which means that, at 25 feet, I could see what a normal person can see at 20 feet. This lasted until my 40s. Due, in part, to all the time I spent staring into computer screens, my vision deteriorated. I first noticed it while trying to read the TV Guide. (The earlier format had a lot of small print.) I tried getting glasses by prescription, but they did not do anything for me. I bought those glasses you see in drug stores. I need them only for reading and small work like threading a needle. The real issue came, when I tried to figure out how I was going to keep them with me. Since I had never needed glasses before, I had not develop a habit of carrying them. They did not fit into the arrangement of my life. My solution is that I have glasses secreted everywhere I go. There is a pair where I sit, and I am wearing another pair now as I type at the computer. I have kitchen glasses for when I cook or bake. Another pair of glasses, which I damaged and repaired, are put to use in my den, when I paint or work on projects. Needless to say, my wife, who has had normal glasses habits just about all her life, laughs at me all the time.

It is my birthday tomorrow. I am reticent to tell you how old I am, but suffice to say that I feel old. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to accept that, at best, less than half of the stories rumbling around in my head will be written before I'm gone. I guess I am feeling my mortality this evening. I always knew I would die, but the idea was a nebulous one until a few years ago. Then it struck me how many paths I had started that would go no further in my lifetime. The older I get, the more I feel like a snail racing against a clock that might as well be calendar. Oh well. Back to writing. Cake will have to wait for tomorrow.