I came across and old little notebook last night. Reading through all that slog that had collected in it is funny. This notebook contained snippets of the past, much like bits of dirt that collect under your fingernails. The little odds and ends stretched from my final two years at Emily Carr up to my first few weeks at Kaldor.
Little thoughts and lists, to-do items and little rants (hey, it was artzchool)—it’s all more descriptive than it first seems. In addition, my penmanship has gone disastrously to hell. I am more than a little bit dismayed.
It was amusing last evening, because I read notes on one of my first main projects at Kaldor, which was incidentally, the first time I had met and worked with Kunal Sen, who has quickly become a good friend. A year and a half later, he’s become one of my go-to bros for brunches and dinner parties.
In it also contains dumb doodles from production meetings and drawings of gnomes and pizza and clouds with faces. It also includes notes I took for an old Emily Carr project, wherein I researched unhappiness and its relationship to the brain and body.
Particularly embarrassing, but not quite, was a quick free-write I did after seeing a particularly poor gallery show at ECU. They come and go, with hits and misses, but somehow this one show—I can’t even remember it anymore—made me super angry about all the bullshit at school. I was very bitter by the end of it, really. I’m not proud of it, but something makes me hang on to these snippets.
Is it important to keep journals like this? I wonder if these thoughts and notes will accumulate into something, much like how old ladies make sweaters out of lint and felt.