One of my favorite Bowie songs. By one of the world’s (Universes’?) coolest people. On the job. IN ACTUAL SPACE.

Ohmygod. My heart can’t take this.

Chris Hadfield, I love you.

So I somehow came over a recent picture of Jerry Seinfeld.

He looks like this today:

At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Is that really him? The Jerry of my youth?

So I googled pictures of him.

And shit, he really does look like your next door 3amo.

Growing up is creepy, brother.

Trained eyes don’t function like untrained eyes, because they are trained to see more. It is never simply a chair, a website, a ketchup bottle, or a printed word. It is grids and geometry. It is a series of decisions made by someone else. It is technical limitations in a world that inherently hates limitations.

Visual training is a strange process with no expiration date. You are not born with the ability to see. Yes, your system perceives shapes and colors around you, because your biology is built that way. Inherently though, you are blind, because your brain fills in what it wants to see, ignoring everything else.

Growing up with an artist and an art educator for a mother helped me develop my visual skills from a young age. I don’t remember when I started drawing, and I took my first advanced painting class at the age of 13. I would spend days trying to imitate the light play taking place on the faceted surface of a crystal water vase.

Yet, even with that, when I was a freshman art student, I sat in the studio of Jordan University horrified at my own blindness. I could see that the surface of the Venus I was trying to replicate on paper was more curved at the bottom because of the light and shade, but my eye perceived it as straight, because the actual sculpture was straight. I yelled at my brain a lot that semester, going into conversations with myself about the insanity of how humans are built. The brain imagines the way things look based on per-conceived notions, and it’s hard to unimagine. Drawing is actually really easy when you convince your stupid brain to stop seeing on its own. It took a while, but I was eventually successful.

You are not born with the ability to see. Your eyes don’t see anything. Your brain is the one working.

I am lucky to be able to see how the beveled shadows beneath modal boxes on websites give an impression of depth. I am lucky to be able to see how the serifs on that sign make it more legible from a distance. I am lucky to be able to see that that color isn’t orange at all, it’s actually a combination of cyan, white, and magenta.

Being able to see is poetic. Life becomes much more beautiful, and much more ugly. Start training yourself, because you could be blind right now.

The best way to start training is to add a layer of “why?” to your thought process. Of course, not everything around you is built with intent, but many things are, especially in nature, thanks to evolution. Why is the tree curved like that? Why is the website based on three columns? Why is the poster using that particular typeface? Why does the shadow look like it’s curved?

Why?

Awesome poet unknown

Artist unknown.

I mean, the last movie I was excited for was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and before that, it was The Lord of the Rings.

Ender’s Game, yay.

You know, I am always amused by the process of having my favorite books turn into movies.

Just think of it this way: until a book is made into a movie, I’m the only person sitting in a virtual room representing the book, full of its characters, ideas, and stories. Sometimes, random people who have also read the book visit my room, and we get excited together for a few minutes. Then these random people drop back out of my life.

I try to get my friends and loved ones to visit my room and enjoy it like I do, but most people hate reading, especially reading science fiction. For years and years and years, the room is mine and only mine, which is annoying, because I want to share my pleasure with others.

“Please come play with me in my room,” I say again and again (such a dork, I know). “Please read this book.” But people are lazy. People don’t read.

Then one day, Hollywood takes these books and makes them into movies and TV shows, AND BAM! Everyone is suddenly sitting in stadium-sized rooms of distorted characters, ideas and stories, surrounded by massive amounts of noise and idiocy. Of course, I have no interest in these stadiums, I am happy in my room, where I have spent years building nurturing, two-way relationships with the characters, ideas, and stories. The Hollywood layer is alien to me, because I usually don’t bother to watch the Hollywood adaptation.

A few examples: I was a child when I read the first Harry Potter book, at a time when no one had any idea who he was. Then I watched the world go crazy over Harry as the movie star was born. I was a child when I read The Lord of the Rings. Most people had no idea what The Lord of the Rings was, beyond being a big fat book. On the bright side, bless Peter Jackson and his brilliance for making the movie adaptations genius too.

The worst of the books-cum-Hollywood adaptations has been “Game of Thrones”. Everyone and their dog has fallen in love with the series, crassly saying things like “Winter is coming”. I want to beat people who stay stuff like that up. Not because it’s a crappy show (though I was unable to watch more than 2 episodes of the first season as the books are so much better), but because I CAN HEAR THE YELLING FROM THE DAMN STADIUM IN MY ROOM ALTHOUGH I HAVE ALL THE WINDOWS SHUT.

Shut up. I don’t want to hear you yelling. You’re giving me a headache.

In November, one of my all-time favorite books, Ender’s Game, is being turned into a movie. I am excited, at this point at least, because I spent so many hours of my life lost in the Ender universe. I’ve written about it on this blog many times, expressing my passionate love for the genius of Orson.

No one cares. No one has even heard of Orson, Ender, or the Formic race. It’s my room, and my room alone (although I did manage to get my brother Omar and my mother to visit me). Come November, I’m going to share this post again. The Ender craze better not be as bad as the one for “The Hunger Games”, or “Game of Thrones”.

I just can’t comprehend the power of movies.

Ok. Rant complete.