Entry tags:
Childhood Follies
One of the weird, random gender behavior assignments of my youth was stationary. For some reason, collecting random crap was considered a noble pursuit, and the number one thing that little girls collected was colorful stationary. Toy stores sold ultra-cheap sets of paper and envelopes in pastel colors, with little drawings printed on the margins. You could use them to write letters and greeting cards for birthdays, but most girls collected and exchanged them.
Possibly this was supposed to be an exercise in prosocial behavior or something. It wasn't focussed on the buying of more and more stationary, although it did make a convenient cheap gift that parents could use as rewards for good behavior (or treats for when the kids were sick). Basically, your social status determined who you could trade with, and the more friends you had, the more diverse your collection. If you got a set of stationary from your parents, and you still had 8 out of the 10 sheets, you were a friendless loser.
Another quirk of the stationary system was that each pack had half as many envelopes as sheets of paper. However, the makers had grossly overestimated the verbosity of third grade girls. Even with an effort, most of us could barely fill a whole page. This created a constant shortage of envelopes and, as everyone knows, packaging a nice stationary page (LOL shitty kids' stationary that costs 5*10^-11$$ or thereabouts, but it was sparkly) in a lousy white envelope is just the height of gauche. It is a grave insult to the girl receiving the letter.
Anyway, I just realized that the way I arranged the images on my seminar presentation strongly resembles the arrangement of ugly cartoon images on the shitty stationary I collected as a kid.
IDEK.
Possibly this was supposed to be an exercise in prosocial behavior or something. It wasn't focussed on the buying of more and more stationary, although it did make a convenient cheap gift that parents could use as rewards for good behavior (or treats for when the kids were sick). Basically, your social status determined who you could trade with, and the more friends you had, the more diverse your collection. If you got a set of stationary from your parents, and you still had 8 out of the 10 sheets, you were a friendless loser.
Another quirk of the stationary system was that each pack had half as many envelopes as sheets of paper. However, the makers had grossly overestimated the verbosity of third grade girls. Even with an effort, most of us could barely fill a whole page. This created a constant shortage of envelopes and, as everyone knows, packaging a nice stationary page (LOL shitty kids' stationary that costs 5*10^-11$$ or thereabouts, but it was sparkly) in a lousy white envelope is just the height of gauche. It is a grave insult to the girl receiving the letter.
Anyway, I just realized that the way I arranged the images on my seminar presentation strongly resembles the arrangement of ugly cartoon images on the shitty stationary I collected as a kid.
IDEK.