I was reading an article about hand lettering comics and noticed a familiar object. It was lekalo, a toy I used to play with when I was a kid. My father is a drafter (he is 70 now and still works) and he keeps a set of three lekalas home, in case of kalym -- a side job. I was fascinated by their elegant shapes, none of which was static, they were always in process of becoming another shape. I can recognize the top left one on the picture, but this one I liked lest. My favorite had more sophisticated contours.

When I was 8-10, my father used to bring home some machinery parts from his factory and teach me to draw them in three projections. When we started to study drafting in school -- and we had two years of obligatory drafting classes in the Soviet Union, I still have no idea why this subject was so sweet to the communist government -- he checked my each homework because he was afraid that our school's requirements aren't quite up to the industrial standards. No sloppiness was tolerated, so I had to re-draw almost all of my works. I didn't protest, I was flattered by his sudden interest in my studies, and thought that it was my duty to maintain family honor (in other cultures vendetta serves the same goals).

Last summer, when I visited my family in Russia, my father confessed that the only thing that let me avoid a career in metallurgy was that no college in my home city offered a program in it. Otherwise there wouldn't be too much talk about what profession was good for me.