Tacos and Kings

There's something delightful about summer.

I love long, warm evenings of golden light and contentment... I love frolicking without thought of jackets or sweaters... I love the feel of floating through perfect warmth.

I think home and summer have become mentally intertwined since venturing off to a land of seasons and cornfields. Christmas felt strangely (wrongly) summer-esque after leaving a home of snowy whiteness in favor of a home of mild-climated "pompous palm trees" (as Brynna terms them).
But summer fits home (real home) perfectly.
Driving down PCH with gorgeous, dramatic, coastline views can only make my lips smile proudly and my heart delight in the beauty of home; catching a glimpse of blue, shimmering, watery vastness never fails to make me happy. Home may not be perfect, but it's home... and it's beautiful.

The last few days have been wonderfully summeresque.
Sunday evening there was a very happy bonfire, complete with storytelling, discussion of life-plans, a brief bit of sand-waltzing (note: sand is a terrible surface for waltzing), nonsense songs, and delicious s'mores. T'was merry and warm and delightful!
After the bonfire a group of us decided to travel to a popular taco truck (yes, that's right) and gorge ourselves on very, very tasty carne asada tacos. The few outdoor tables and chairs that were available were, of course, taken. So we opted to stand and eat off the trunk of my car instead. As I watched my recently-washed-and-therefore-unusually-clean car become littered with pieces of onion and tomato, I could only laugh at the odd picture our feasting forms must have made to a casual observer.
The tacos were delicious and the rendezvous delightful. Ahh, summer! Ahh, home!

Yesterday afternoon was also fun and summery. I met up with el señor Lubbers at the Coffee Cartel- a cozy, beachy-chill (dare I say hipster-y?) café bedecked with unique art pieces, obscure books, a suit of armor (why?), and comfy-shabby couches perfect for lounging and enjoying the company of friends…whilst sipping coffee, I suppose. Actually, the barista who was working there when we got there was extremely amusing, if not altogether present. I quite appreciated his appreciation of the word melatonin (“Say it. ‘Melatonin.’ Isn’t that such a cool word?”), his inability to remember whether both or neither of us wanted whipped cream (“I knew it was both yes or both no. They’re such similar words. They both have three letters. Don’t start with the same letter. Have no letters in common. Makes it so hard to tell them apart. Umm, two, three- it’s the same thing. Less than four letters. ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ It just makes it so difficult to distinguish between them.”), and his assertion that the day's special contained unicorn blood and was nothing short of magical- yeah, he was a fun guy.

But the activity that took over the Coffee Cartel reunion was not coffee centered.
No, a different activity consumed us.
 Much to my consternation, Lubbers forced me to play chess. I begged, I pleaded- to no avail. Against my protestations, the chess board was promptly brought out, set up... and before I knew it I was engaged in battle.

Now allow me to provide some background.
For reasons I can't quite fathom, I had never actually played chess before. I had distantly watched others play... I had a basic understanding of the pieces... But throw myself into battle? Nay, not I! 

This almost makes no sense. Chess seems a pretty... thoughtful, intense game- just the sort of game I would enjoy. And as I found myself trying to decide on moves and thinking through how to save myself from death, I did indeed find myself enjoying the game immensely. It was just the sort of focused thinking I tend to relish. But then I recall my state at the beginning of the game: I had no idea what I was doing, I felt stupid, I desperately wanted to evade a situation which could only result in embarrassing, bloody massacre... in short, I was terribly, cripplingly afraid of the sense of shame and failure that one risks when trying something new. Afraid to the point that I would plead for a different activity. And then it makes sense.

Okay, so I lost. But it was not a bloody massacre (er, right Lubbers?). I made a few short-sighted errors, but it was okay. It forced me to focus and think and do my best, and I loved it.

Something causes me to suspect there may be a lesson in here somewhere... It will probably take a few more (many more?) classes for it to stick, but at least it's a small step in the right direction. Hopefully I have a few more friends willing to ignore my initial protestations and to be supportive when it counts.

Oh and a note on drawing- I'm pretty sure I achieved the zenith of my artistic career yesterday. I pretty successfully managed to capture the slender, flowing, glorious beauty of a nymph statuette which I have admired since girlhood. Annette is very pleased.

Oh, summer! Warm, carefree summer!

How Drawing Leads to Epistemological Pessimism

To be fair, I have never claimed artistic ability. Painting, sketching, sculpting... all of those wonderful things have always delighted and eluded me.
Nevertheless, two summers ago I was seized by a random desire to try my hand at sketching. I made copies of multiple pictures which struck my fancy, and was actually rather pleased with my work. But my artistic ventures ended with the long, idle days of summer.
Until last night.
I was sitting on my bed, trying to conjure up some form of entertainment for an idle summer's evening, when I remembered the old kids' sketchbook buried beneath books and notebooks in my bedside drawer. On a whim, I procured the sketchbook and began to look through it (Wait...did I really do this two summers ago? I thought it was last summer! Time passes by much too quickly!).  Leafing through the old drawings inspired me to do a bit of drawing to pass the time.
For my first target I selected the fruit bowl which graces my kitchen table. Moderately satisfied with the result, I then decided to tackle the lovely porcelain doll who presides over my room. Within a matter of time I had a page containing a rather poor, but satisfactory rendition of the porcelain doll (I need to set reasonable standards for myself) alongside a decent (again, by Annette-standards) fruit bowl.
Gazing at my portrait of the lovely little doll, I began to consider how challenging it is to faithfully capture reality. 'Tis impossible! So many details to be accurately captured and conveyed!
It can be rather frustrating to be able to look at an object, to imagine it, and yet to be unable to transfer it onto the page (or whatever medium one works with). Or at least, it is for me.

Now this is somewhat interesting, isn't it? Art, broadly construed, toils patiently in pursuit of faithfulness to reality. Art seeks truth, doesn't it? (Does it?)
The very process of artistic creation seems to be an attempt to distill truth from life and enclose it within one's work.
But how curious that truth exists so sneakily- accessibly, yet slippery; elusive...

The problem of drawing- of accurately capturing reality or truth- parallels the problem of knowledge. (Enter skeptics.)
In seeking to transfer reality from the world to the page- do we ever manage to capture and present truth? Or is everything hopelessly distorted? Is our rendition causally linked to that which inspired it (therefore bearing a visible connection to it), but inevitably warped and morphed into a new being?

Take my porcelain doll. The girl on the page is clearly not the doll before me (sad, but true). Although I began by attempting to faithfully copy what I saw before me, the inaccuracies accumulated until the final product clearly differed from the original  (No, really. It's a totally different gal I have on the page before me). Although my drawing has its roots in reality, and although the girl in my sketch may be said to be descended from the doll, they are not one. Certainly there are key similarities as a result of the causal connection between them- but can I reliably use the sketch to arrive at certain truths about the doll? Can I know the doll by looking at the sketch?
Given my drawing... it would appear not.

Now, what if I want to protest this? My drawing is not great, but it's also not terrible. You could conclude the doll had curly hair, you could describe features of her dress...you could get some things right. And what if I made consistent errors in my sketching? Perhaps then you could look at the drawing, take into account the errors I regularly make (of course, this assumes a knowledge of those errors), and thus use the imperfect picture to arrive at precise, if not entirely accurate, conclusions. (Admittedly, the notion of "precise" qualitative conclusions is a bit fuzzy.)

Okay, so perhaps you already see my point, but if not, let me make the connection a bit clearer.

Suppose (granted, this is a bit of a strange supposition) you lost your ability to visually interact with your environment. Instead of actually being able to see the flowers in front of you, or your mother cooking dinner, or someone walking down the street, you could only see sketches that other people had made of these things. (Maybe we're dealing with some sort of weird eye device implanted by crazy government folk trying to take over your life. But that's beside the point.) The point is, how confident would you be that you actually know what's going on around you? How much do you trust those drawings to guide you through life? Do you actually know what's happening in your world?
Sure, it would depend on the quality of the artist. If you were given my drawings, you'd have a bit of a tough time... But perhaps with other people's work you'd do just fine. Sure, there will be some discrepancies, but they might be small enough that you don't quite care. But you- poor you with the uncomfortable chips in your eyes- have no idea how good those drawings are, and no means of accessing that information.
Perhaps you have enough accurate information to get around without too many mishaps- but would you be willing to say you know your world?

Now you may be thinking, Annette, we don't have chips in our eyes. This is stupid. Okay, maybe it's a bit silly, but think about how we get access to the world. How reliable are our senses? How much can we trust our mind to faithfully translate reality for us? Are there inevitable, undetectable errors which occur in the process?

I don't know. But sometimes it makes me wonder whether I really know anything.