R is for Rose

I enjoy people very much. I think I will have several future blog entries on my encounters with some of the interesting people I have met, was touched by, read about and have learned from. I wouldn’t be who I am today without them. Even now, I look forward to continuing my adventures in the vast wonders of humanity, as I wake up every morning.

I don't remember exactly when Rose and I got close but I do have distinct memories of what I treasure in her.

I very much enjoyed our many lively and often bizarre discussions starting with her book series collection of Griffin and Sabine’s correspondence by Nick Bantock which I had borrowed and re-borrowed. For one, I had fun reading it during the night and then going to Rose’s cubicle at work to complain. The book was too symbolic for my very technical mind and I needed someone like Rose (who majors in psychology) to interpret it for me. We almost always ended up having different opinions and what started as possible logical explanation of events, would end up to being illogical, fancy and near crazy interpretations. And of course, Rose’s interpretation almost always ends up being closer to the truth than mine.

Rose is the only person I know who drinks starbucks coffee primarily to collect the receipts so she could enroll in Starbuck’s customer survey, answer the survey online (!), to get free book planners during the end of the year….and this she does, not just with Starbucks but with Fully Booked bookstore too. Yesterday, I saw her writing on her new sleek Fully Booked daily planner which she got because she probably is at their top twenty customer list. (And she probably will be one of the bookstore’s major shareholder someday, all because of the free daily planners they give at the end of the year. Imagine that.) Other daily planners that you could buy, don’t interest her. For Rose, it is definitely the journey (and probably the exclusivity of that journey) that matters.

What ties us together is our shared passion for drawing. Rose draws cartoons. She does most of her drawings during meetings, (when she is supposed to be listening and paying attention to the discussion – to which she would strongly emphasize that she IS listening and paying attention to the discussion). Sometimes I am tempted to schedule a meeting with Rose, make a bogus presentation and pretend to discuss something just so she can make those nice cartoon doodles for me.

Here are samples of her nice and fun work. I have gotten her permission to put them in this blog. She tells me that I am using her drawings to make up for my slack of not having made anything of my own lately. (She is partly right, as always. :) The other reason is that I really admire her for her free style cartoons and really, people should see her drawings. I couldn’t wait to see what her drawings will be five years from now. The latest of her drawings is a bird drawing where she practiced using watercolor pencils. (I couldn’t scan it at this time unfortunately). She use to tell me that she is not a watercolor person because she likes the very clean and neat outlines that her pen creates as well as the control that pen and ink medium gives . (She painstakingly shades the outline, thickens it with a fine point pen and makes it look like she had used a thicker pen or paintbrush.) But on her recent bird drawing, she veered away from that and still has her distinctive style showing.

That’s one of the things I like about Rose, she is very distinct being her own person. I remember I use to struggle finding my own voice, my own identity. In a way, I still am continuing that process of searching and redefining who I am.

Art is a beautiful way of knowing and exploring one’s self. Because you cannot express in paper what you are not in person.