This post marks a departure from the sloppy, narcissistic solipsism of the previous posts in this series. Actually "this series" is over. I have begun a new series. So this post actually marks a new series, not a change in the current series. I will however be using pages from the current sketchbook, the same sketchbook that I used for the recently ended series, as graphical scientific illustrations for the new series. Just to make it clear to my readership, or mother, that I haven't given up on my resolution to do two drawings a week for the whole year.
New series: A scientific study of my life, beginning with college and going back, like a paleontologist, digging down through layers of dirt to find older and older fossils. What a miserable job that must be, digging and sifting through the dirt, looking for bone-shaped rocks. You can tell how miserable it is by the toys they give kids to promote the science: Shovels, sieves, and tooth brushes. The etchings look fun though.
And speaking of fun: The Marriott Library. My primary college residence, or my primary hangout while in college. For most of my collegiate years I resided in my parents' basement, and did not experience a great deal of the magic and excitement of the college years that you see in movies. I wish I could say that I devoted that socially muted time to intensive study, to the maintenance of 20+ hours of bio-engineering and applied mathematics classes, but obviously I can't, or I wouldn't have built up to it.
I spent a lot of my freshman year in the Marriott, with my face buried in textbooks, sleeping. I did discover the abnormal psych section in one corner of the fourth floor, and spent a good portion of waking time reading the kinkier case histories. I also enjoyed finding a study desk by a window where I could watch people walking on the sidewalks outside, or, as depicted here, I particularly treasured the rare days I found an empty desk around the edge of the atrium, with the marvelous view of the people wandering the lower floor card catalogs and or pretending to study at the other desks.
But that was freshman year. Utah is a commuter college in a fairly populated area, which, I've been given to understand, offers a more impersonal, or less iconographic, college experience than the small town university. A part of me enjoyed the bleak solitude of afternoons on campus, but I'd seen enough frat-centered college movies to know that I was missing something. I believe advertising agencies are built around this strangely suggestible facet of the human mind; that an artificial image of life, pretended to be lived by attractive and well dressed people in a setting far from one's life, or possibly any real person's life, can instill a powerful desire to imitation. They call it "following your dream" in America. It almost always ends in disappointment, but the small minority of success stories are the people with the free time available to write books about it.
Forgot my original point again, but that doesn't matter. Whatever point I thought I would make was a digression from the more important general purpose of this new blog direction. So I digressed from a digression from the redirection, bringing it all back the new direction. Which is science, meaning charts:
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