The morning was not interesting. I slept less than four hours. I had to pay bills.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel went to bed around three in the afternoon and I couldn't blame him.
The afternoon improved instantly from the point when I walked over to see
rushthatspeaks. We watched several music videos and the fourth episode of
Hannibal. (This show is so good.) We made omelets for dinner when
gaudior got home, fended off cats from a plate of sardines, and then went for dessert in Central Square. It was supposed to be dessert in Harvard Square, but the only thing that looked like parking for miles turned out to have a moving permit slapped on it prohibiting street use between the 13th and 15th of November, so we went to Toscanini's instead. I thought I was ordering a cup of half salt caramel and half pumpkin ice cream with hot fudge and somehow ended up with a pint of same. Ate it. No regrets.
And tonight I came home after stopping at Whole Foods for goat milk and yogurt and discovered that a friend with whom I've had almost no contact in fourteen years had sent me an envelope stuffed with index-card cartoons I had given her in high school. I wasn't expecting them. I didn't recognize her married name on the return address. I have been sitting here experiencing cognitive dissonance. They're unmistakably mine: the handwriting, the fact that little bug-eyed cartoon faces were my sole trick of visual art and I exploited it shamelessly, some of the very LHS-specific jokes. I didn't remember half of them. There's the alternate history where the Mayans scare off the conquistadors with bitter spicy chocolate and the ones where I daydream in class and the ones where I'm seeing a caricature of Sigmund Freud for my compulsive cartooning tendencies and the ones where I learned from Jim Henson that a sketch ends best when somebody explodes and the really embarrassing one where I complain about the depressingness of the twentieth century . . . and I did not grow up to be a cartoonist. At all. I mean, it's not hard to see why. There are about sixty cards here on the dining room table—my friend says in her accompanying letter that she kept her favorite twenty-five, which I thought was a joke until I started counting—and they're really, really rudimentary work. It would be one thing if the art were just kind of scrawly, but as far as verbal humor goes, they're really awkward. That's fatal. The punchlines run on too much, or they're obvious, or they're just kind of naive; I can see where the joke was supposed to go, but it doesn't necessarily land. I had a thing for meta, characters talking back to their creators or complaining through the fourth wall. It would have been precocious if I were twelve, but I must have been fourteen or fifteen for most of these (there are at least two cartoons about yearbook signing and similar mentions of sophomore classes; I don't seem to have put dates on any of them) and I can't help feeling that if I'd had any real talent for cartooning, it would have manifested by then.
And then on the other hand I turn over card after card and think, "Wait, I learned to write in different fonts? There was a time in my life when I could draw water-splashes? That's an umbrella getting struck by lightning and that's the sound effect of someone walking into a refrigerator in the dark. That's a dream sequence where I get menaced by cartoon demons until I remember it's a dream, think of a pencil, and scribble all over them and make my escape." I think of myself as an idiot when it comes to art. I did a sketch in colored pencils of my brother's parakeet when I was in eighth or ninth grade and a watercolor drawing of a dragon parade around the same time that are both on the wall in my parents' house and I don't hate them. Otherwise I know that all the genes for generating things that are interesting to look at went directly to my brother and I don't begrudge him for it, I am just sorry that I have all the fine draftsman's skills of a yak. Except that in tenth grade I didn't seem to think so. All through high school, I didn't think so; I drew dozens of these little comics for friends and close teachers and her letter is quite right, I never kept any for myself. And so it doesn't matter if they're really stupid, or if—I left some objectivity around here somewhere—they just weren't brilliant, I am incredibly glad to have them as reminders of things I
tried. Take that, Tiny Wittgenstein. I wonder if I can still threaten to draw a satirical cartoon version of you. It'll have bug eyes and anxious eyebrows. Are you feeling lucky?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}