Monday, September 13, 2004
I woke up this morning at 5:10am and decided to get a head start on getting ready before my friend Jason called to go running. After brushing my teeth and going to the bathroom I jumped back in bed until he called, I’m only so motivated. At 5:24am, 9 minutes after he normally calls and debating whether I should or not, I decided I’d call him. He’d hit the snooze button and fell back asleep; so we decided we’d just run tomorrow morning.
Instead of going back to bed I figured get up and start the day, well start the day by continuing my reading of Craig Thompson’s CARNET DE VOYAGE, I should have been reading my textbook. When I got Carnet and started reading it I thought it best to not just rush through it, but savor each diary entry. Next spring, though, I think I’ll pick it back up and reread each daily entry on its corresponding day, just one year later.
Carnet is an amazing travelogue diary of Craig’s 3 month trip and book tour to Morocco, France, Barcelona, and the Alps. While Craig’s illustrations are absolutely gorgeous and breathtaking, his lines and brush stroke are superb, it is the emotion that he puts into every page, every illustration, and every word that really attracts me to his work. It’s guys like Craig and James Kochalka that inspire and motivate me to write down my story, to keep a diary and cherish every moment, but I continually get in the way and think I can’t draw, I can’t write, who would want to read this? Then I remember I’m not writing this for anyone but myself, it also helps to have friends who are smarter than you.
One of the entries in Carnet talked about the food in France, meats, cheeses, potatoes, and chocolate, and one person comments that Americans have a problem with obesity because of the guilt associated with it. While I think there are a lot of people in the U.S. who are comfort eaters, heck I’m guilty of this at times, I think a bigger factor is we have no idea about portion sizes and have been trained to gorge ourselves at the buffet to “get our money’s worth” and to super size it. In another entry Craig goes to a four star restaurant and enjoys a 12 course meal, but if you look, the portion sizes of each course is small enough so that one can eat a 12 course meal. Americans on the other hand are given Texas-sized portions, to warrant charging $10-20 a plate, as opposed to halving the quantity and charging less, but food is so cheap that wouldn’t maximize their profit. I also think we don’t feel we have the time to cook a little bit of everything or to cook from scratch. (We get everything out of a box and just heat it up.) And I think since we don’t get that taste of a little bit of everything like Europeans, when we do get that taste we eat too much because “we might not get it again for a while.”
One sign of a great book is that it makes you think about and discuss what you’ve just read, Carnet De Voyage is a great book. Do yourself a favor and pick it up and while you’re at it get Blankets and Goodbye, Chunky Rice too if you haven’t already.
