Before the onset of Girl Guide wrath (there was alot of it actually...not just the life-size cookie incident) there was the matter of other kids' birthday parties.
Birthday parties were highlights of my year, as I went out very little otherwise, when I was a kid. So upon being invited by said children, invariably better off than I, my mum would take great pains to buy fantastic presents for me to bring to the party so I wouldn't feel left out for the duration of the festivities. Said presents, however, were almost always unwrapped and then tossed into the corner by the ungrateful brats (cough cough), and they were almost ALWAYS the illustrated books that I wanted for myself and didn't get.
But there it was.
So. The night before each party, I would sit at the dining room table with a pencil and a huge stack of paper and the book in front of me, and endeavour to copy out all the pictures and poems before we had to wrap it up and give it away the next day.
And there would invariably be sweat and tears as paper after paper would get scratched up with mistakes, and then crumpled and tossed away, 'coz for some reason I felt like without a perfect replica of each page of every book, there was just no further reason to live.
sigh.
It's lovely to see that I haven't changed one whit in my thirty-five years. Of course, now, instead of copying childrens' picture books, I copy photographs manufactured from my life.
Funnily enough though, something has gone either very right or dreadfully wrong; I once could never get close to the perfection of the subject, and now I actually often prefer the drawings I make to my real life.
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