There is no such thing as a perfect face. You know that human beings tend to perceive bilateral symmetry as beauty. That means, the more the left half of the face mirrors the right half. the more beautiful the face is.
But why do we think that? No real person’s face is actually like that. Look at the girl on your right. Her eyes don’t match. The googly-eyed expression on her face may indicate that eating pencils can cause brain damage. Can you get lead poisoning from graphite pencils? Or is it just that her cartoon great grandfather was Barney Google?
And the girl on the left has a weird blush pattern on her cheeks. Perhaps it isn’t a blush. Probably she’s been biting into exploding tomatoes.
How about this face? If you put a line directly down the middle of the face, you can see that each side nearly mirrors the other. People think of that as handsome or, possibly, cute. A nearly perfect face. Me, I prefer the face of the boy. The Muppety puppet, despite it’s perfection, seems almost ugly to me.
Intelligence is revealed by the eyes. The girl on your left is looking directly at you. It makes her seem smarter. And we all know she is anyway, even without giving her a test.
Emotion is also conveyed mostly through the eyes. It is obvious that these lion eyes (or is that spelled LYIN’ EYES?) are looking at you with love. Yes, love. And he would love you even more with ketchup.
A face can tell you more about a character than thousands of words of mere description can. Do you know what Vladimir will be drawing in your art class on his first day in your classroom? I think you do. Strawberry Shortcake and Disney Princesses. What else? Oh, geez… you’ve grown a bit jaded over the years.
Teachers, well, the good ones, will need a welcoming, calm face, no matter how bad of a hair day they are having.
And would you welcome a face to face with this face? Especially on the very day you sacrificed a black cat and two chickens to create a black magic spell to punish your ex-wife? After her lawyer left you with nothing even though you were not the one who spent all the money in your joint checking account on a face-lift? And she didn’t even try to make her danged face more symmetrical!
But enough about faces for today. Everyone who is anyone has one, you know. It’s the style going around. Even though it’s been a year since you’ve seen them without a mask on.
The World is Gray Today
It is cloudy outside. The sky is a cool, damp gray. No rain. No snow. Just dreary and gray. The world is gray today.
We have now been in a lockdown and wearing masks for an entire year. I have lost a lot of ground. Color-blindness runs in my family on my mother’s side. Great Grandma Hinckley was completely color-blind by the time she was in her 70’s.
I myself have known I had the color-blindness problem since I was in high school and the school nurse gave me a vision test that proved it.
In the dotted circle, I could see the blue-green number 29, but I could also see the red number 5. I was told that I had a slight color-blindness on the red/green scale. Believe me, I had no idea what that meant. Still don’t. I just know I have never seen colors the way other people with normal vision do.
But now, after twelve months of lockdown, I can definitely detect the fact that I have lost some more of my color vision.
Great Grandma saw the world in black and white and gray since she was 70. That, for me, is now less than six years away.
As a cartoonist I use a lot of pen and ink. I also love black-and-white movies. Being partially colorblind, you might think that I would be okay living in a film-noire world. But I am not. It is simply not enough. I have always craved color. I particularly love to create with bright primaries, red, yellow, and blue.
I will sorely miss color when it is gone.
And I have always loved cardinals. Not only because they are bright red songbirds, like the one singing outside in our yard on this gray and slightly blustery day. But because they never fly away when the winter comes. They stay even in the snow and cold. Trouble doesn’t drive them away. I shall not give up when I lose all the colors.
I remember the world being gray when I was a boy back in the 1960’s too. TV was only black-and-white… and gray at our house. I watched the funeral parade for JFK on the black-and-white… and gray TV. And around that time the three astronauts Grissom, Chaffee, and White had a similar funeral parade… also black-and-white-and-mostly-gray.
The Viet Nam conflict on the TV news with Walter Cronkite. The riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968 with the Chicago Seven going on trial. The world was very, very gray.
But then, in the Summer of ’69, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. A giant leap for mankind! And I saw that also in black-and-white-and-mostly-gray.
There was a hope of color in my life after that. And we got a color TV in the later 70s after that. And even with my partially color-blind eyes, I saw color everywhere.
And now again is a good time to anticipate color coming back into my life. I am on the waiting list for vaccination. My eldest son has a steady girlfriend living with him now. And we have a better President who actually seems to care if we live or die. Good things are over the next hill.
But still… the world is, for now… gray today.
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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, coloring, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, insight, Paffooney, poetry, self pity