2. this is pretty much the first drawing i’ve made since high school.

some of my drawings and paintings from high school are hanging around the house, and one of my mom’s daycare parents saw them and asked me to draw her kids. i said yes mostly to be nice, even though she’s paying me. it had been six years, and i wasn’t sure whether i was still capable of it.

it felt strange, though. when you’re drawing something like this – a portrait which should resemble its subject – it takes time. it’s a process of trial and error trying to get the lines just right. you draw one, look at the big picture to see if it works, and then either erase and start again or move on to the next line. it’s a time-consuming process, trying to get your fingers to replicate the details your eyes see. in fact, it’s a process that defies any time limit. you could allot a few hours to work on it, but there’s no saying how long it could take. in this sense, committing yourself to drawing something like this feels like a rebellion against the busy, fully scheduled, multitasked days this modern world requires. working on a drawing means i’m giving up time that could be spent learning about what’s going on on the other side of the world. it means i’m postponing a check of my email inbox. it requires a focus that muffles thoughts of the outside world, and because of that, it’s kind of therapeutic.

after realizing this, i got to wondering how i had managed to go so long without drawing. i never really drew outside of class in high school. i guess it was enough for me to have the talent; i didn’t feel like i had to actually use it. (maybe because everyone at trinity was so talented, being able to draw felt commonplace?)apparently when carolyn’s mom told my mom that i was doing a couple drawings for her, my mom said, “oh good, you got her to do that again!” and now that i think about it, i can’t help but feel the same way. it’s reflective of a larger realization i’ve had recently, a realization that took way too long time to come to me. it’s not what you can do that matters in life – it’s what you do do that matters. clearly, the lesson behind “this little light of mine” didn’t sink in despite singing that song and hearing the parable countless times growing up.

anyway, i’ve resolved to draw more often. i’m thinking that drawings of the three boys i nanny might make a good going-away present for the family when i stop working for them in august/september.

… he was partly a young man of our time – that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish – such sacrifice is often almost beyond the strength of many of them.

1. “these young men” are universal. they are not just “of dostoevsky’s time.”

2. i thought of this in reference to a section of the book talking about the cult of and obsession with death/martyrdom that flourished in camps of arab (and some non-arab) muslims who traveled to afghanistan in the 80s to fight the soviet invasion. they fought against the communists because they perceived them as advocating materialism, just a different form of materialism from the one offered by “the west.” the influence of this materialism was supposedly undermining societies throughout the islamic world, but instead of working within their societies to uphold traditions as active partakers in those traditions, these young men chose to defend their societies by abandoning them, going out of their way to make war against the materialists, hoping above all to become one more addition to the body count, naively, eagerly stamping out their own lives in self-induced death that resembles suicide more than than sacrificial martyrdom.