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On the train on the way to the gym for my swim lesson tonight, I noticed that I was seated across from a young woman who was working in her sketchbook. She was attentive to her work and did a good job of translating what her eye saw to what her pencil drew out.

She had some difficulty with the foreshortening of the outline of the eyes of her subjects, especially from the side. And no wonder: that’s a very tricky set of transformations in three dimensions to be mapped out in lines in two dimensions. So without lecturing (I prefaced my comments by saying that I was only reminding her of something she obviously knew intellectually but was having some difficulty practising) I made a suggestion about how to think about the shape of the eye. She showed me a few pages in her sketchbook that I hadn’t seen from shoulder-surfing, and then my stop came. I smiled and said good-bye, and went on to the gym.

What I learned: just like taking out the trash, talking to a pretty woman involves about 20 minutes of obsessing in preparation for 2 minutes of actual activity. And while I don’t regret having the conversation, I’m reminded that yes, it is better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t done. Isn’t it?

So that’s it for today. I get to do this again tomorrow, but I don’t have to worry about it until then.