Student-aged people sure do romanticize theirselves, don't they? At the time, I thought I was being all gritty and unsparing, but that heroic pose! The main thing that comes flooding back to me when I look at this is how hellish oil painting was. I was used to hit-and-run sketching, and here I was forced to spend hours on a nose. And when, after weeks of laboring, you step back and see you have the perspective wrong, there's nothing to do but scrape it all off and start from scratch. It was hellish, I tell you! I spent most of a semester on this painting, and never did another. One more episode in a life full of false starts. Ah, yoot! Ah, regret!