fat, overstuffed, manila folderfuls. I am pretty sure this is most of them. others might be scattered around various other notebooks or piles, but these here constitute the closest thing to a sketch archive that this disorganized amelia girl keeps. the sketches are mainly sorted according to the size and shape of the paper they were drawn on. it would of course make more sense to categorize the things by date or by theme, but I just have this feeling they'd take up too much space that way. they take up enough space already.
there are too many. I have been blogging one every Sunday since 2009.
the digitized versions don't weigh anything... I don't think... (or do they? do stored gigabytes technically have any mass?)
but as I wondered how much the paper-and-ink collection might weigh, I realized that I had the tools with which to answer that wondering.
my little kitchen scale says the whole pile weighs eight pounds and almost twelve ounces. there are entire human newborn babies that don't weigh quite that much. and these are only most of my accumulated sketches. I wonder how many sheets of paper are really in this huge pile. I'm not going to count them though.
there is an almost-memory I keep thinking about, from somewhere in my almost-tween years, when I was a young girl scout. mum and I were visiting neighbors, hawking cookies. I noticed all the similarities in every doorstep conversation, every description of the caramel-nut-cluster Juliettes. I may have even commented, in a clueless, judgey, childlike way, on how silly it seemed for this articulate parent of mine to be so, so tiresomely repetitive.
this memory (half re-upholstered with inaccuracies after all this time, I'm sure) adds to the shame I feel about having eight pounds of sketches to choose from and yet redundantly posting at least a handful of them more than once. as if someone might have missed them the first time. as if I couldn't bear the thought of those particular sketches not being seen by as many eyes as possible. as if the internet is in need of even more multiples of even more images of mediocre quality. none of these as ifs are true. I am not worried about my silly sketches being missed or being lonely. I have no excuse at all for littering my dear blog with duplicates. as yet un-remedied proof of my carelessness is openly available here in exhibits 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, and 3B. and there have been more cases; sometimes I do catch them and replace the repeats before too much time goes by. but who knows how many I have yet to notice.
tiresome repetition is all in the eyes and ears of the beholder though, really, which is a thing I recognize much more maturely now than I ever did as a not-quite-tween-year-old. if the doorsteps are new and the neighbors lucky enough to be unspoiled by your cookie-spiel, you probably don't need to worry, no matter how clueless your selectively-perceptive daughter might be.
the internet is not a series of separate doorsteps. this blog makes a very different and less forgiving context than a neighborhood, I think. reposting stuff--even if from bouts of inattentive blogpost scheduling, and even if my distracted, forgetful brain does give the stuff a new title--feels intolerably lazy. I might owe my tiny audience here an apology or two. or my tiny audience may not have noticed, since one random ink sketch per week most likely doesn't count as high-priority web content.
nevertheless: I am disappointed in my distracted, forgetful self. one day I'll automate the sunday scribble posts entirely, and then things like this won't keep happening.
there is an almost-memory I keep thinking about, from somewhere in my almost-tween years, when I was a young girl scout. mum and I were visiting neighbors, hawking cookies. I noticed all the similarities in every doorstep conversation, every description of the caramel-nut-cluster Juliettes. I may have even commented, in a clueless, judgey, childlike way, on how silly it seemed for this articulate parent of mine to be so, so tiresomely repetitive.
this memory (half re-upholstered with inaccuracies after all this time, I'm sure) adds to the shame I feel about having eight pounds of sketches to choose from and yet redundantly posting at least a handful of them more than once. as if someone might have missed them the first time. as if I couldn't bear the thought of those particular sketches not being seen by as many eyes as possible. as if the internet is in need of even more multiples of even more images of mediocre quality. none of these as ifs are true. I am not worried about my silly sketches being missed or being lonely. I have no excuse at all for littering my dear blog with duplicates. as yet un-remedied proof of my carelessness is openly available here in exhibits 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, and 3B. and there have been more cases; sometimes I do catch them and replace the repeats before too much time goes by. but who knows how many I have yet to notice.
tiresome repetition is all in the eyes and ears of the beholder though, really, which is a thing I recognize much more maturely now than I ever did as a not-quite-tween-year-old. if the doorsteps are new and the neighbors lucky enough to be unspoiled by your cookie-spiel, you probably don't need to worry, no matter how clueless your selectively-perceptive daughter might be.
the internet is not a series of separate doorsteps. this blog makes a very different and less forgiving context than a neighborhood, I think. reposting stuff--even if from bouts of inattentive blogpost scheduling, and even if my distracted, forgetful brain does give the stuff a new title--feels intolerably lazy. I might owe my tiny audience here an apology or two. or my tiny audience may not have noticed, since one random ink sketch per week most likely doesn't count as high-priority web content.
nevertheless: I am disappointed in my distracted, forgetful self. one day I'll automate the sunday scribble posts entirely, and then things like this won't keep happening.
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