Last night was my first drawing class at Fleisher. I've been meaning to take a class there for years, and I finally remembered in time to register. I was a bit nervous, but it was a good mix of pretty friendly people, the teacher was completely unintimidating, and it generally just felt great to mix and chat with a bunch of strangers. Our exercise for the first night involved copying geometric shapes from a xerox onto a paper using no rulers or straight edges. The goal was to practice object placement based on relation to other objects on the page, rather than exact measurements. I never realized before how difficult it actually is to draw a straight line. It was a simple enough exercise, but it was so amazingly meditative. I said to the people next to me that I couldn't remember the last time I was able to focus on one thing for so long. It's especially refreshing since these days my job seems to be getting more and more hectic, and I feel like I'm multi-tasking past my brain's ability. To be able to leave work, where I'm doing twenty things at once and being interrupted every five minutes by some other request, and then go spend two hours drawing a triangle feels so luxurious. And if I wind up meeting a few nice people along the way, all the better.