I’m pretty inspired by the ingenuity and dedication of the people that live in my neighborhood and the neighborhoods surrounding ours: Noe Valley, the Mission and the Castro. I especially enjoy watching and interacting with the self-employed and the practitioners of off-the-beaten-path professions that I come across here. I go for long walks with my sketchbook and camera and try to record the characters that I fixate on. I like to let them know without actually saying it to their faces (I’m shy!) that I appreciate what they do. Sometimes I also like to provide unsolicited advice. It’s probably best if I only provide this advice in my sketchbook. These illustrations represent my attempts to be an outgoing, good and observant neighbor.

The first in a series of helpful mantras, mottos, and self-esteem boosters for the modern day someone-or-other.

I am by nature an obsessive hoarder of memories, so when I was looking for a job after my first year of college applying at the local scrapbook store seemed like a good choice.

I had held various jobs throughout high school and my first year of college, but I’d never worked retail. My interview consisted of answering normal retail-type questions and also dropping off a sample portfolio of my “work” (which meant a scrapbook). Working in the scrapbook community is an amped-up version of regular retail; not only do people come in and buy your store’s products, they then transform the products into something incredibly personal, oftentimes while you watch. (Besides that, a good portion of your customer base is women who routinely drop hundreds of dollars on craft paper.) At the time, scrapbooking was a $2.5 billion industry; there were dozens and dozens of magazines devoted to scrapbooking, there were scrapbooking trends and celebrities, there were scrapbooking cruises and conventions and conferences. When I first started working there I thought I’d stay separate from all that, that it would just be a job and that I wouldn’t get too immersed.

The store itself was in a strip mall, next to a hole-in-the-wall shipping establishment and a burrito place. It was medium-sized, and open seven days a week. We had three full aisles of papers (both printed and cardstock) and a wall of stickers, a dining-table-sized chest of die-cuts, a few racks of various yarns and fibers, an impressive selection of empty albums and add-ons, and then the rest of the store was mostly embellishments. The “shabby” look was big when I was there, so there would be things like faux-rusted hinges or weathered-looking metal cutouts or porcelain nameplates. If it sounds expensive, it was; one frequent customer used to pay only in checks and write SAFEWAY in the memos to hide her visits from her husband.

*that I don’t watch.