Life in a Box

It has been a lazy week. K has been off work for the holiday and we’ve just been vegging at home for the most part. During the week I reorganized a box containing what remains of my personal artifacts; the first 30-some years of my life stuck away in a box. It struck me that, in the end, this is all we’re left with from our former selves. Like ashes in an urn from our cremated history, after time is burned away we are left with a few memories, some photographs, school papers and projects, letters received from others, notes written to parents, pictures drawn, booklets from commencement ceremonies, and other miscellanea. Like a pack rat, I filed it all away. I suppose I hang onto this junk because it is a part of me, just like my fingers and toes.

Yesterday K started poking around on ancestry.com. I looked around there a little for my grandparents and realized how much smaller our boxes become over time. If the boxes in our attics and basements are not passed along to our children, over time the only things that might remain are census and death records - not much from a rich, long life.

Life is so fleeting, so hard to capture. Imagine the supercomputer that would be needed to store all that you have ever perceived and thought in your lifetime. The attempts to capture life are interesting. I found one man’s attempt to record his face every day over a six year period here. Speaking of self-portraits, I came across some in my boxes. I was never able to adequately draw myself. Of course, when I was a child this is to be expected:

circa kindergarten

But, even as an adult I was never satisfied with what I could reproduce – here is what I could do in my 20s:

circa early 1990s - I look kind of flattened in this one

and here is an unfinished self-portrait that I did in my late 20s:

circa late 1990s - not too bad, maybe I should have finished this one!

I suppose I should also post a comparative photograph of me, so you can see how "off" (or not) I was. I hate how I look when not smiling, but I'll post a picture anyway:

circa 2007

Because I could never really get it right and don’t like looking at myself in the mirror anyway, I abandoned the self-portraits. I did try again several years ago, but this time my goal was to draw how ugly I felt one particularly bad day – here was the lovely result (hopefully I don't actually look this bad but ironically this might actually be one of my best self-portraits!):

circa 2005-2006