.
! And so forth.
This started as a Secret Santa goof; I pulled out one of my boxes I made up a little twelve page booklet for my recipient, and by the time I was done I realized I liked the idea itself a lot, and so I've cranked out a bunch more, organized my cards a bit, and started this blog.
With the cutup baseball card theme, this is a sort of spiritual successor to my old project
Buntcake, but a lot simpler to produce; each entry is one or two cards + xacto knife + gluestick, hand-lettered and run through a scanner, so I don't have to futz with much and I'm done producing a given entry before I get tired of it.
I collected baseball cards as a kid, particularly between 1988 and 1990 (and I've got a lot of Donruss from those years to prove it), but at the time I didn't really know
why I was collecting them. It's possible it started with a gift from someone who figured that's what 10 year old boys do.
What I do know, looking back with clearer eyes, is that I didn't remotely care about baseball (at least not unless
robots were involved); I didn't really care about trying to find out if my cards were valuable, let alone haggling with shop clerks or other kids for money or trades; but I sure did like sorting things, and baseball cards with their index numbers were eminently sortable. If I'd had this revelation back then I probably could have gotten myself some library card catalog drawers and been happy reindexing them.
So this project is a more honest appraisal of my relationship with my card collection than anything I did with it as a kid. These are weird artifacts of a culture I don't follow, that I don't know why I own; why not treat them as a sort of Rorschach and try to find something meaningful and maybe funny in them on my own terms, divorce the card content from its purported cultural context?
Plus since I was ten when I got these things, I can use that as an excuse to
giggle about poop jokes.
posted by mathowie at 8:21 AM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]