Whereas my last post wast kind of boastful of my unique handwriting, this post is the opposite.
Being an artist, taking science courses is usually just a bit curious. Usually it only has slight ramifications. Like for graphing in 3D, the texts and teachers just used the below left axes. But I made my own, I thought more artistic axes, shown by the below right axes.
It even had its perks to be an artist in a science program. York University was divided into 7 colleges. Mine, Bethune College, was the science college. It also had its own newspaper – the Lexicon. The editor of this paper asked me, upon seeing some of my art, if I would be the political cartoonist for the paper. I had never done actual political cartoons before. I refused initially because I felt it would cut into my study time. But then he offered a sum of money at the end of the school year if I would do it. I figured out that at 3 hours a cartoon it would pay as much as a minimum wage job. So I agreed. And I was glad to do it, being a news junkie I had built up an intolerance to politicians. So I think it was successful.
My 3rd year Electromagnetism course started innocently enough. Early on they introduced a small r variable. Because I was enamoured by my new lowercase written r, I decided to use this r for the little r. Despite the fact that my lowercase written r is a smoothed capital r written the size of lowercase letters, it didn’t even bother me that they introduced a capital R variable. I just made sure to make the uppercase R blocky and large.
But mentally I freaked out a bit when later that semester they introduced a 3rd r. It was called a script r. It was basically a written small r. At first I didn’t know what to put it down as in my notes, but I felt I had to make a decision that class. Aesthetically and artistically I never liked my written small r. So I refused to use that. Instead I fancied up my small written r as shown below, last amongst all the r’s.
Now taking 3rd year Physics is a fast and pressured existence. And my passing cushion was never that high. I did okay in my other courses but when the dust settled at the end of the course I realized that I had failed this course and thus took it again the next year.
I had the presence of mind to keep my notes and looked at them at the beginning of the next year. I perused them to the introduction of the 3rd r. My suspicions were more than confirmed as I realized that in the first few pages I made a few slips and wrote the wrong r. I don’t know how bad my old notes got because I didn’t continue the autopsy. But I simply decided from the outset to stick firmly with the r’s as given and not do anything fancy. I passed that second time around. So that is how art made me fail a science course.
And I see the official Electromagnetism 3rd year script r up there that I wrote for this article and, still, artistically I don’t like it.
