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On the train on the way to the gym for my swim lesson tonight, I noticed that I was seated across from a young woman who was working in her sketchbook. She was attentive to her work and did a good job of translating what her eye saw to what her pencil drew out.
She had some difficulty with the foreshortening of the outline of the eyes of her subjects, especially from the side. And no wonder: that’s a very tricky set of transformations in three dimensions to be mapped out in lines in two dimensions. So without lecturing (I prefaced my comments by saying that I was only reminding her of something she obviously knew intellectually but was having some difficulty practising) I made a suggestion about how to think about the shape of the eye. She showed me a few pages in her sketchbook that I hadn’t seen from shoulder-surfing, and then my stop came. I smiled and said good-bye, and went on to the gym.
What I learned: just like taking out the trash, talking to a pretty woman involves about 20 minutes of obsessing in preparation for 2 minutes of actual activity. And while I don’t regret having the conversation, I’m reminded that yes, it is better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t done. Isn’t it?
So that’s it for today. I get to do this again tomorrow, but I don’t have to worry about it until then.
I think your goal should be
I think your goal should be to reduce the latency between visual acquisition and first sentence down from 20 minutes to about 15 – 30 seconds. If you need to think longer than that about what you want to say, beyond “Hello”, then you probably have nothing of value to say, and should simply leave it at “Hello” and wait for the other person to initiate the next salvo.
Here’s a trick that I swear by- when you are about to talk to a pretty girl, quickly remind yourself that her first internal reaction to your comment will not be “I am a pretty girl”. The reality is, she’s going to be far more focused on what you said, that who she is at that moment. Going back to my first comment, if you’ve said something that evokes a response from her, you’re over the hump, and the conversation should be off to a natural arc of some duration. Girls want to be spoken to, and the girls you want to speak to don’t want to be objectified before that conversation starts.
This is actually akin to the Meisner technique of acting, which basically says that, if you pinch someone, they say “ouch” instinctively. Taken further, whatever you say, and the tone with which you speak should evoke an instinctive response from the other person in the conversation, and by simply listening to the other person, you facilitate that response. This is difficult to accomplish if you are stuck in your own thoughts.
Good points, all duly
Good points, all duly noted.
In my own defense, I exaggerated about the “20 minutes” part. It was more like five or seven minutes, and I was listening to music and reading a book when the crowd on the train thinned out enough that I could see that there was someone sitting across the aisle from me. So it wasn’t exactly like taking the garbage out. I saw her working in her sketchbook, went back to my book, glanced over, looked and found the person she was sketching, went back to my book, looked over and noticed the foreshortening issue, went back to reading my book, etc.
Right on.
One of my favorite
Right on.
One of my favorite places to strike up a conversation is in line. Check-out lines, bank lines, movie lines. This is all wasted time we might as well spend getting to know our neighbors.
Sometimes I wait for something to happen that we can both observe and comment on, sometimes I announce something odd or trivial and see who bites the line, and sometimes I make observations about total strangers to their face. Nothing critical, usually. Just probing. It’s fun. Since we’re all stuck on this rock together, we might as well discuss the situation.