Tuesday, May 16, 2006

In Search Of The "Gee" Spot

At some point in the morning I noticed that my head felt rather heavy and cotton-filled, and as the day wore on this developed into a full-on headache, the kind of headache that makes you feel listless and sick to your stomach.
So when I got home, despite the fact that it was kind of late in the day for me to do so, I crawled into bed to take a bit of a nap.
When I got back up the pain and nausea were gone (for the most part), but I still felt (and still do feel) kind of groggy.
Red Hat training, as mentioned, was largely review for me, though it was a little more interesting than the Unix intro class I took, as is this one we actually get to log into the GUI rather than just opening up a terminal emulator and connecting to a server.
(If you don’t understand any of that, it doesn’t matter.)
Still, I think Brian is pretty well bored out of his mind and most of what’s being covered is, I think, to put it into geek terms, being redirected to dev/null.
Yes, that was a pretty geeky thing for me to say, but trust me, I’ve got nothing on the other nerds in that class from the instructor, who combines a thick beard with big round earrings that look as though he borrowed them from his mom to the guy with the magenta hair.
The majority of the people there, I think, actually work for the same company as Brian and I (though there’s nobody that we know).
We all had to introduce ourselves and say where we worked at the beginning.  The last guy to speak had to show us all up by announcing that he works for NASA.
Show-off.
One good thing about the class, beyond the free snacks, soft drinks, catered lunches, and validated parking, is that we got quite a few little freebies, including the installation discs for the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a flash drive(64 MB), all of which came inside of this zippered portfolio organizer dealie (which included a pen and a notepad).
Given that I haven’t gotten any sort of response back since I e-mailed it to her, I’m guessing that once again Kathleen doesn’t like her Heroic Portrait and just doesn’t want to tell me, particularly after not liking the last one.
I suspect that I’m going to find that among whatever customers I manage to get, the women will be the hardest to please.
This isn’t based solely on the fact that in general women – especially for me – tend to be difficult to please but on some experience I’ve had in this particular area.
For example, while overall she liked it, Stacy did have a minor complaint (a too-mannish jaw) about her portrait, and in the past when I’ve done the D&D portraits for Scott and company, even though those weren’t portraits in the sense that they were representations of real people, the only complaints I had were from the female players.
And in general over the years I’ve found that women are more likely to be critical of my work and point out flaws than men.  I’m not sure why that is, but that’s definitely been my experience.
(No one, though, is quite so critical of my work as I am.  However, I do often find that women will find fault some aspect of my work that I’m either particularly pleased with or where I at least don’t see any major flaws, which can be kind of infuriating.  I mean, if you’re going to say that something of mine sucks you should at least say it sucks for the same reasons that I think it sucks.)
Certainly it’s rare for me to find a woman who looks at my work and is as impressed by it as guys tend to be.  Maybe it’s my typical subject matter.
Or maybe I just suck and most guys aren’t honest enough to tell me that.
But whatever the case, when it comes to women and my art I just don’t seem to be able to hit the “Gee” spot (as in, “Gee, that picture is awesome!”  Sorry, it was a bad pun that I couldn’t resist, especially in my weakened, groggy condition.) too often.
Of course, I could be wrong in my prediction, and I’ll have to actually start getting customers (and actually put up a working Web site) before I’ll know for sure.
Next week I’ll put some serious effort into putting the site together, I swear.
In the meantime my head is still feeling fuzzy, so I think I’m going to stop trying to think and just watch some TV.

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