Jones - Post-it note diaries: 20 stories of youthful abandon, embarrassing mishaps, and everyday adventure

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Table of Contents

Stories of
Youthful Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps,
and Everyday Adventure

for my Mom

FOREWORD

About seven years ago I worked at a Chicago marketing company performing blandly surreal tasks like color correcting photos of fast food and designing newspaper ads for supermarkets. It was a comfortable job and paid the bills, but when I was a kid and had envisioned myself growing up to be an artist, I never thought that would mean turning gray hamburger meat into brown hamburger meat with Photoshop or laying out coupons for cat food.

The worst part of having a boring office job is figuring out what to do with yourself during the most boring parts of the daythe sleepy middle hours of the afternoon when youve finished all your work but have to appear busy. Its during these momentsthe ones when you find yourself theatrically shuffling and reshuffling papers around your desk, secretly playing online Scrabble, or stabbing pencils into your leg to stay awakethat you feel like youre blatantly wasting your life. To combat my workplace boredom, I got crafty. Using items swiped from the supply closet, I covertly made long garlands of linked paper clips, rubber band balls, and little sculptures of animals out of masking tape. These were small and silly gestures of defiance, but at the time I found them oddly empowering, like a prisoner making a shank from a toothbrush handle right under the oblivious noses of the guards. It was during one of these crafty moments that I started to obsessively draw on Post-it Notes.

Around the same time, my friend Starlee Kine, who was a producer for This American Life, invited me to participate in a literary event she was throwing as a good-bye party for herself before moving to New York. I wrote my story at my job, pretending to work on a spreadsheet document. I decided my story needed illustrations, so I made a bunch of quick drawings on Post-it Notes and scanned them. Later at the event, I clicked through a PowerPoint slideshow of the drawings as I presented my story. To my surprise the formula was a hit. The audience seemed to respond to the drawings specifically because they were on Post-its, something everyone uses.

Inspired, I kept writing stories while on the clock and slowly filled pad after pad of Post-its with drawings. A few years later I moved to New York, where Starlee and I started a literary event called the Post-it Note Reading Series. It was an experiment, where both established authors and nonwriters could present stories that I illustrated. Each show featured four or five presenters and a slide show of three hundred to four hundred of my Post-it Note drawings.

From the reading series comes this book. Some of the stories are new, some are old favorites from our shows over the past four years. I chose true stories because I felt they matched the medium. Post-its are used to communicate simple, direct, and necessary messages like Sorry, I ate all your cookies, Buy more toilet paper or We are breaking up, and I hope the stories in this book are just as blunt and recognizable to you as the canvases they are drawn on.

My Position on Subway Fares

by John Hodgman

Many people have asked me to explain my position on the New York City subway fare increase from $2 to $2.25. I am happy to oblige, and to do so, I present these two true stories that happened on two separate lines of the subway.

The L Train

It is not necessary for you to know how I came to own a small green staff with a large green Styrofoam cobra head on top.

Suffice it to say I was taking the L train last week, holding my cobra staff with the rubycolored plastic gem eyes, which until recently I owned.

When the train reached Union Square, a gentleman, whose name I would later learn is Marcel, sat down beside me. And I could tell he was checking out my cobra staff.

This came as no surprise to me. In fact, the staff had been getting a lot of attention all daypeople would look at it, and then at me, and then at the staff.

I know they were all thinking, Theres got to be some story here, about why he owns that cobra staff. Is he some kind of wizard?

The fact is, there is a story, but not very much of one. And so it was then and there that I established my policy on the matter: You do not need to know.

But Marcel was a determined man. That is really something, he said in a Haitian accent. Do you know how much it is worth?

As it happens, I did know. It was worth exactly zero dollars because I had no use for it, because I am not a wizard. Also, it was a very shoddy cobra staff.

It was just a cut-off piece of broomstick, and if there are grades of broomstick, this was the lowest, most splintery grade. And barely painted green.

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