I Can’t Stop Sketching I Think You Should Leave
We have an art show on May 2 at the Denver Nook on Tennyson Street from 5-8pm.
I can’t stop doing I Think You Should Leave sketches.
Not, like, performing the sketches from the Netflix show and saying the lines all the time, though obviously I can’t stop doing that either.
I mean these:
I mean this:
And this:
Let me explain …
A few months ago I thought I’d learn to draw, and I read that the best advice is to just non-judgmentally practice as much as you can, so I started drawing pretty much anything and everything. After a while I found that I liked pausing the TV on something so I could study it on the big screen.
I Think You Should Leave was my favorite for this because 1) it’s my favorite show, 2) I like sending the pictures to my brother, and 3) the facial expressions are so interesting that it makes practice fun.
See?
Here’s what Sam Anderson says in the New York Times about the show’s star and writer Tim Robinson’s face:
Robinson’s face is both anonymous and one of a kind. He has a big flaring dolphin fin of a nose; small, deep-set eyes that sit in little pools of shade; a warm, gaptoothed smile. His resting expression is bland, sweet, harmless — he looks, most of the time, like an absolutely standard middle-aged white guy who might be sitting next to you at an airport or a marketing conference. Someone you would feel perfectly comfortable asking to watch your stuff if you had to get up to go to the bathroom.
But when Robinson activates that face, all kinds of amazing things happen. Tiny microexpressions ripple across it at high speed. He seems to have extra muscles in his forehead, because he can knit the space between his eyebrows into lumpy little mountain ranges of confusion, skepticism or disappointment. His quiet mouth gets very wide and loud.
I’ll say:
Obviously drawing so many of these is absurd behavior, but clearly I can’t get enough of it. Having the time to explore hobbies for the sake of learning is one of the best things about joining Kind & Funny and foregoing the tyranny of the 40+ hour work week.
And if we’re to take it from Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, embracing the absurd (aka the fact that we are alive and don’t really know why and someday we’ll die) flows naturally from that work week:
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
I know that feeling, and Tim Robinson knows that feeling too:
This reminds me of a book that I loved called 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. A lot of people get an anxious feeling when I tell them that 4,000 weeks is equal to about 80 years, and that the book is about how “confronting our radical finitude—and how little control we really have—is the key to a fulfilling and meaningfully productive life.”
I agree with Oliver Burkeman, and I have definitely had the feeling he describes in this sentence from the book:
Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”
Albert would agree with both of us, I think:
Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for justification … He weighs his chances, he counts on "someday," his retirement or the labor of his sons. He still thinks that something in his life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a point of contradicting that liberty. But after the absurd, everything is upset.
We aren’t promised “someday.” We have now. And getting lost in the present and experiencing “deep time,” which Burkeman calls “that sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting the abstract yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead” helps us regain our perspective on that.
And you know what helps me experience the vividness of reality and throw out that stupid yardstick right now?
Believe it or not …
See you at the art show. jed@kindandfunny.com.
Also, I found this article in doing research for this blog and they do a good job on kind of the same subject if you’d like to read more.