the underwear drawer

pearl paint

This might seem like the height of nerdiness, but I'm really, really in love with the new art supplies I bought at Pearl Paint yesterday. Yesterday was a perfect post-call day because:

a.) It was all rainy and cozy
b.) Joe was post-call too
c.) We had burgers, and
d.) We went to Pearl Paint

I love Pearl Paint. I love browsing in there and running my fingers over all the brushes and paper and foam core (whatever the hell that's for) and having this fantasy that I'm an art student living on the Lower East side of Manhattan out of my studio space, all grungy and poor and shit. For some reason I have this romantic notion about art students, like there's some intangible cool about being one of the legion dyed hair multiply pierced punks wandering around with their obscure band t-shirts and paint-stained hoodie sweatshirts. Maybe it's that sense of having a job where, at the end of the day, you feel that you created something, even if it is some tampon in a teacup (tm Daniel Clowes) bullshit piece of arte nouveau.

I know that must seem weird to say, because wow, how fulfilling to be a doctor, you help people, blah blah blah, but think about it. What did I do today, really? I wrote a bunch of prescriptions and sent seven patients home from the hospital. And then I answered a bunch of pages and ate lunch standing up in front of a computer. Wow, why don't they make a reality show about my life? Oh right. Because it would suck. Not to mention a headache to watch, because everyone's faces would have to be all pixellated to be HIPPA compliant, and it would be like "The Real World: Hawaii" where they had to blur out every single shot because people were walking around naked all the time.

So anyway, I yesterday I picked up a few new erasers, a right-angle straight-edge, and a draftman's mini-duster, whose sole purpose, it seems, is to sweep up those little plastic bits off your drawing after you've inked in your lines and erased the pencil marks. (I had been using a blush brush, but the static cling effect was terrible.) My real true love is the Factis soft eraser. Not only does it erase like some sort of an...erasing...machine (sorry, ran out of steam trying to think of a good simile) but the eraser bits actually cling to themselves, glomming together into one gigantic eraser bit rather than a thousand small particles. It's like the T-1000 of erasers! I came home and erased things and was very happy.

Currently reading: A blog that Andy mailed me the link to, with the e-mail subject, "They copied you!" Not that I own the intellectual property on the field of medical online journalling or anything. But if I see any comics on that site, they're dead. Also, I will out them because I think I've figured out what med school they go to. Don't ask me how. I have my ways.