the secret city

it was another incredibly slow day today. well, so that i don't give the impression that i do nothing useful, i should say i had plenty of things to get done, but i had nothing to do but wait until my compute jobs finished. after reading about obsolete supercomputers, darwin, coupled cousins, the euro, and andrew viterbi on wikipedia for an hour and a half, i got up to get some tea and read a magazine in the breakroom. (note: in my defense, at least one of my colleagues spends his waiting time reading world of warcraft forums)

it's getting harder to pass the time. i wish i knew how to draw. i have a whiteboard sitting on my desk. it ought to be hanging from the cubicle wall, but until now, nobody has come by with the necessary brackets to hang it up. the other day, i scribbled a picture of two people fencing on it with a red dry erase marker. i think tomorrow i'll draw something juvenile like a treasure map.

i used to draw treasure maps when i was younger. i would take a piece of manila paper and draw in some mountains, a little forest, rivers, and a circuitous dotted line trail that would end on an "X". my favorite symbols to draw were the requisite skull and crossbones and the compass in the bottom left hand corner. i would draw all of this in pencil. after i was finished, i would crumple the paper several times until dust started falling and the paper became soft. when unfolded and held up to the light, you could see pinholes in the paper. the crumpling would soften and smear the pencil lines and the end result would be something that looked old. i made a ton of these. i wish i still had one.

i also used to draw diagrams of the space shuttle. these were based on a diagram i had in a scientific encyclopedia. i even know which volume it was. volume 18. this volume is stained red on the edge because one day, i took it to school and my fruit juice box broke and stained everything in my backpack.

i'm always amazed when i see people doodle in their notebooks these days. i had a colleague who would doodle while sitting next to my boss in a meeting. what he would draw was exactly like something i might have drawn when i was six years old. these days, it never occurs to me to doodle.

there was a show on pbs hosted by commander mark who would draw on a clear dry erase board at the end of every episode. each drawing was a continuation of a mural of daily life on an alien planet. i remember the aliens had noses like trumpets. i met commander mark once. he came to our elementary school and drew for our class in the library.

wow, that seems like it was a lifetime ago.