I remember when I was a kid, putting together news clippings, photos, and stuff about celebrities from magazines into a little drawing pad. Think I was around 4. I liked the idea of putting stuff together to make pretty picture books.
Think I was around 7 or 8 when my Grandma got me a proper photo album with Micky Mouse on the cover. It was a hobby of mine off and on till I was in high school.
Then in 2002, the movie Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood came out. It was featured on Oprah and all anyone could talk about was the scrapbook they had in that movie. And it put the idea into my head that the coolest thing on the planet would be to have a scrapbook sort of like the one in the movie. Which of course didn't work at all, because everything fell off of the damned thing. I'd like to know what kind of glue the props department for that movie used to keep everything attached.
But the thing is, as unattractive as my scrapbook was that year, it became the center of something else for me. It kept me busy no doubt about that, but it was the record of the start of an evolution for me. I had just had a massively bad few years and that was a turning point in my life.
I've since added three other scrapbooks to the collection. None as interesting as that 2002 one. Nor as carefully done either.
Here I am now, a decade later going through another bit of a transition.
Yes, there is another scrapbook. This one, I hope reads better. But what's got me talking about this tonight is the way the whole scrapbooking thing has gotten. Websites devoted to the hobby. Companies that make nothing but pages for it. Whole themed projects. I've found myself in the middle of a ball of quicksand more then once not knowing how I got there, with people who live and die by the idea that unless you are spending a fortune on scrapbooking supplies and doing it like a step by step program with themes and matching colours and layouts and this that and the other thing with brand name stuff... your not scrapbooking.
One thing I always liked about the idea of scrapbooks was that there are no rules. It's as personal as you are.
That's the view from my sofa tonight.
