“Yes, thats exactly how you do it, just draw lines that follow the shape of whatever it is you’re drawing.”
I’m confused. The drawings printed by Ms. Podestá, the art teacher helping me with my project, appear to have complex volumes and it’s all done with lines that follow the shape of what’s being drawn. I must have missed something in her explanation, this sounds too easy to be true.
“Just lines?” I ask.
“Well, these lines have to be drawn purposefully of course,” Ms. Podestá says calmly, “if you just draw lines it’s going to be a mess. The secret is in making your lines parallel, and of course knowing where to put them. If you are going to draw lines without thinking then crosshatching would be a technique automatically mastered by three-year-olds.”
“On Thinking Different” is going to be the title of my POL this semester (the subtitle is yet to be written) and I think that is the essence of what freedom is. Freedom is often defined as the opposite of slavery, and when talking about freedom this semester we decided that slavery didn’t really have much to do with freedom. I challenged myself to think different about that opinion and now I disagree. We are modern slaves of our minds, our bodies, society, school, a demanding person and even media. I think that now, as we are not literally chained and (hopefully) physically oppressed by an individual in a higher-standing, what we need to do to free ourselves is to think different.
Think different about your mind and you’ll recognise your bad habits. Think different about your body and you’ll become more confident and start liking yourself more. Think different about society and you will see how controlling it can be at times. Think different about school and your educational system and you’ll start appreciating education more. Think different about a demanding person and you’ll start questioning their authority over you and you will gain self-esteem. Think different about media and you will get both sides of the story.
But I think the most important thing of all is to think different about yourself and you will start to understand everything you’ve ever wanted to understand.