So I’m doing a “konmari” on my house and getting rid of… just the most stuff. In this process, I stumbled across a folder collecting a ton of my old drawings, including this weird experiment I tried for about three months back in 2013 – creating a single image of something that happened to me each day. I’ve been holding onto these drawings for years, but I think it’s time to let them go…
…right after I photograph them and share them all one last time.
I spent a lot of time in 2013 really concerned about being lonely for the rest of my life. I’d also grown a beard, which was pretty momentous, and I started working as a manager for a health care clinic, suddenly making more money than I ever in my life thought I would.
Most days I’d go out jogging for about fifteen/twenty minutes. That was about all I could stand.
I was REALLY into cartoons. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was, and remains, a pure favorite.
I did most of these drawings in less than fifteen minutes apiece. My sense of the human figure wasn’t the best: I look wildly different from one day to the next. Interestingly, though, I made the choice to try to capture exactly what I wore each day. I’m pretty sure I still own the shorts in the upper-right corner.
The thing that stands out the most in each of these pictures that show me at work is how much, even then, I felt worn down by my job. Being a manager nearly killed me.
So apparently I have played the “penis game” at least once in my life. I have no memory of this.
I found a bunch of pretty interesting ways to depict “I just worked a lot.”
I used to throw “Saturday Morning Cartoon Parties,” where I’d get a bunch of my adult friends and their kids together to watch a bunch of different cartoons and eat cereal. We’d watch Batman: The Animated Series, DuckTales, and, of course, My Little Pony. I actually recall Jem and the Holograms being a particular favorite… for certain values of the word “favorite.”
I used to belong to this amazing book club. We read several books that I still consider personal favorites to this day, including My Name is Asher Lev, The Butterfly Mosque, and East of Eden. Pretty sure that’s what’s going on in the upper-left corner here.
Weirdly enough, I think my favorite drawings from this bizarre time of my life are the ones of me just hanging out in the kitchen and cooking.
I don’t think I’ve ever paid as much attention to pop music as I did during the summer of 2013, where I must have heard Justin Timberlake’s “Mirror” literally hundreds of times. What a stinker of a song.
Setting aside how bizarre the body proportions in these pictures frequently were, I kinda loved the attention I showed to certain unflattering details, like my developing potbelly or the sweat spots in my arm pits.
…or the water I splashed onto my pants while washing the dishes.
Put a gun to my head, and I doubt I could tell you why I drew what appears to be a jheri curl on my little brother.
I also still have this same bedspread that I drew myself sitting or reading on. Now it’s got a huge hole in it, and the stuffing’s falling out. Trouble is my current house is pretty cold, so I never feel like I can afford to get rid of any blankets.
And here it is: an honest to goodness family portrait, drawn by me. My family’s grown by two more munchkins since then.
In all of the dejunking I’m currently going through, my fiancĂ©e has forbidden me to throw away my copy of Midnight’s Children. I should probably try to finish that one again.
Church was a much bigger part of my life during the summer of 2013. I remember making regular trips to the local temple, and, although I have no memory of the “shave your legs” conversation, I’m pretty sure I had it with a young man with Down’s syndrome who went to the same congregation as me.
Although I’d already begun preparations to buy a house, it was housesitting for my brother while he went on vacation that really cemented the idea in my head. I’d be in a house with a life-crushing mortgage less than three months after these drawings were done.
Now we start to see the reason why I didn’t keep these drawings going. As an office manager, I oversaw three employees who kept the clinic running. Here, Employee #1 turns in her two-weeks’ notice.
Also, I hope y’all will like this blog, because apparently that’s something really important to me 🙂
Employee #2 hands in her two-weeks’ notice as well. I must have been feeling the stress, because I made the completely bonkers decision to shave my beard off.
And there goes Employee #3. At this point, I haven’t had a chance to replace any of them yet. For the next month, I ran the clinic by myself, working 12-hour days with no social life and no additional pay. But hey – at least I was still in the middle of buying a house and signing a mortgage.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I actually remember this weekend pretty vividly: hours on end, watching Lost from the warm, numbing embrace of a giant Love Sac.
And that’s it. Apparently, the last thing I did before giving up on this whole experiment was catch a screening of Starship Troopers, which I believe was accompanied by Rifftrax commentary, although I can’t be sure now.
After this, my life changed pretty dramatically. I finally got three new employees hired, I moved into my new house, and I grew the beard back. I’m pretty glad I attempted this project for as long as I did, and I’d even consider trying it again.
Someday, maybe. After the wedding. When life finally calms down again.
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Anybody else hear that music?
braddyverse 