Don’t let my transcripts fool you; I was not that great a student. I was one of those who tuned the teacher out and doodled in the margins of my notebooks. It’s a bad habit that’s followed me out into the real world; whenever I’m in meetings at work, I find myself drawing little faces on my notepad.
Over the years, I’ve saved some of my doodles because someone convinced me that I should, and sometimes when I clean out my folders and files, I end up pasting the bits and pieces onto a single piece of paper. In the years I wrote compulsively to my friend Janine, I sent those single pieces of paper to her, pages and pages of doodles that I thought might amuse her.
Some of those pages found their way back to me when she returned some of my notebooks for my journal records. Well, while doing some unpacking over the weekend, I found a few of them and thought I should scan them and share.
Warning: they’re not that good. After all, they’re only doodles done during bored and furtive moments. I felt guilty about them for years until I visited the Dr. Seuss Collections in the library of my alma mater, UCSD. It turns out that he used to doodle in his math notebooks, too, which is kind of neat since he’s one of my heroes.
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3 thoughts on “Yanking Doodles #1: In the Margins of My Notebooks”
that’s better than the stuff that ended up in my notebooks — unintelligible rambling that that trailed off into random lines and ink splotches. it’s pretty amazing (and amusing) what you think you hear when you’re dozing off.
Well, your "not good" drawings beat my "I’m trying my very best" drawings, hands down. 😉 My doodles usually consist of cheesy hearts and boxes.
I do the cheesy hearts and boxes variety, too, as well as the random lines and ink splotches. I read somewhere that you can learn a lot about a person by studying the doodles they make, but I think most people do the same basic things: weird shapes, lines, squiggles, boxes… not sure what anyone can learn about a person there.
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