This is kind of a random anecdote that I haven't thought about in a while, but I'm attempting to practice telling stories again in case I get invited to any high-society cocktail parties over the holidays, and I get tired of just explaining why I showed up not wearing any pants.
A couple of years ago Aleks and I were on the subway. I think it was around Christmas, and we might have been headed to the Port Authority to take a bus to my Mom's house for the holiday. It was crowded, but we got a seat. Through the standing crowd of people and shopping bags, and across the aisle from us, there was a clean cut guy, who looked like he was in his 30s, wearing a pea coat and jeans. If you were take a giant gold pan to Manhattan and scoop up a random group of 30 year old white men, shaking out the homeless people, the struggling tattoo artists that really want to be film directors but are interning at Time Warner, the art school alums that came to New York to work for galleries after graduation and are just starting to realize that being a shirtless waiter covered in glitter for the gallery owner's weekend parties might not help their photography careers, and the Wall Street guys that play in experimental electronic bands on the weekends, you'd end up with a lot of dudes that looked like this. He was average. And he was staring at Aleks really hard.
As people do when a random person is leering at their girlfriend through a crowded subway car, I stared at him, and prepared to kill him with my mind. Failing that, I was going to attempt to injure him in some way through telekinetic, laser knives fired from my eyes. Then I realized he had a sketchbook on his lap and was carefully drawing.
Every art teacher, or at least everybody on livejournal that draws comics where a really muscular wolf that looks vaguely like them makes out with a sexy fox that looks like a female fox version of their roommate, tells artists to go out and draw from life. A lot of people take this advice.
I put my fake psychic weapons away, but kept looking at the dude, just in case. For about a half and hour to 40 minutes he stared at Aleks, then his sketchbook, then Aleks again, while intensely concentrating on drawing her. Our stop came. As we were getting off the train I walked past him, and looked down to see his work. This is a re-creation, but it is extremely close to what I saw:
