I watched Toy Story 3 this afternoon and the melancholy moments that the film projects throughout got me thinking about growing up. I saw the first Toy Story when I was 10. It’s been a while and so much has changed since seeing the film. Such an impressionable age. It was a time right before everything happened, essentially the beginning of the end in many ways. In the film, the toys are ultimately battling against their owner Andy’s growing up. He’s now 17 and going to college. He’s faced with leaving behind what he’s used to, his familiarities and old friends, to transition into his new life as an 18 year old college student. I think that like our ancient ancestors had to migrate for their hunting and gathering, we have to migrate for education and jobs, leaving behind people and bits and pieces of our lives along the way. Nowadays we have pictures to remember, movies to reflect on our own lives during that time and can even give them a call when we’re bored. I wonder what we used to do to remember?

More teen angst memories from when I ultimately put my old toys away in the attic and moved on.

The last in the Teen Angst Journals series. This one started my senior year and took me into college. There’s a lot more of my own photography, 0 pyrotechnics and it smells less like spray paint and more like emulsion. That year I took three consecutive quarters of photography so it was nice to keep a journal. Nowadays my journals are much more subdued with little or no photography. Mostly scrawl and sketches. Something just happens after college. Entitled, That was then, This is now, the cover features a friend of mine from High School at the basketball courts.

This book was made from a Maxim magazine. It’s been burned and torn, painting and peeled. There’s a lot going on from spread to spread, lots of interesting smells and mediums. I guess you could say this was my first “traveling exhibition” as people in gym class would pass it around and look through its horrifying pages. I can only imagine what they were thinking…

This journal is the second one. Used for about a year and every page has something on it or attached to it. There’s booklets hidden inside the pages and the journal is very fat, probably 500 pages. I remember taping the receipt on the back from the store that I purchased it from, hoping to save the date. The ink has since disappeared, leaving a wrinkled, blank piece of paper. Its titled ‘Inspirational Catalog‘.

In searching through my books I found a stack of my old journals, ranging from age 15 – 20. I never “journaled” until my high school art teacher made us. She encouraged us to complete an entry every day and to get introspective. I haven’t completely stopped doing this since then, however during that time I was doing a lot more of it. The days before livejournal, blogspot and ultimately sad-blog were without a keyboard, mouse and screen. These journals were mostly paint and ink, hand-carved stamps and xerox transparencies, fire and wax… the usual. Here’s the first one of six, entitled Experimental Shit.