Ooddles of Doodles

As noted in my blog about senioritis, I'm not one who is really good at focusing.
I attribute this mostly to the fact that I am a kinesthetic-auditory learner. And at the risk of sounding dumb, reading is hard. Obviously, I'm not saying I do not read. I'm an audio book reader all the way, which yes, still counts as reading.

"But you didn't *read* the book Katie, you *listened* to it, so that's not 'reading'."

Does Braille count as reading? Are we just using a different sense to get the message across? Yes. Pfew. I thought we were going to have a fight right there.

But back to not liking words. Recently, I was in training at my new(ish) job and it required reading lots words, big words in legal jargon, and it was oh so painful. Gah, so many words on a page... Overwhelming. But it was worth it because now I am a notary and know lots of cool things, just like if I had gone to grad school except this was a 5 month process and I did not have to write any papers to go along with this reading...
Which reminded me of college, and made me think of the one thing I actually miss about college.

I was a doodler. Oodles of doodles covered my notebooks. And I miss them.

I already told you about that year where there were so many words I figuratively cried all the time. But what I didn't tell you was about my wonderful coping mechanism which got me through it. Doodling, drawing and illustrating all stories so I could get it together.
I am unashamed that this is how many a German class would go down: I would come in early, my friend Kory and I would discuss what happened in the story, I would go up to the chalkboard, draw it out, and we would have a visual of the story. Often the teacher used my drawing for the class. Epic win. I once taught a class on a story about a hunter; I legit arrived to class super early, drew the entire medieval kingdom on the board, and as I explained elements of the story, I filled in the plot, adding arrows if characters were moving about. I drew a village, castle, forest and illustrated a medieval hunt. Using chalk.
This is how I spent my junior year of undergrad.

Quite recently, I came across this absolute gem, and *this* my wonderful readers, is all you will EVER need to know about "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. When I showed this to my professor, she loved it so much that she photocopied it for everyone and kept a copy of it in her own book so that the awesome may live on. #Proudestmoment. And that's saying a lot as I was also the German Undergraduate Fellow that year. Priorities.

Panel 1: This is dear Werther, he is a poet. His heart is so full, he can't even say. He is so happy that he is away from home and in this absolute enchanting fictional village, whose name is not important, that is writing all about it to his really good friend.

Panel 2: He really likes this girl name Lotte, but she is engaged to Albert. That seems to mean nothing to our dear young Werther.

Panel 3: Lotte and Albert get married. Werther is pretty depressed but also, not really dissuaded by this poor turn of events in his love life.

Panel 4: Werther professes his love and Lotte summarily rejects him... as she is married.

Panel 5: Werther tells Lotte and Albert that he can't live this way, and that one of them must die. So naturally, as in any German novel, he shoots himself, but he doesn't even do that right and it takes 12 hours for him to die. Because why not, Goethe, why not? 

Panel 6: Werther is dead and no one really cares because he was whiny to begin with and totes was trying to be a home-wrecker.

The End. Now you don't have to read it.

I decided against taking pictures of my old notebooks, as the doodles range anywhere from Calvin and Hobbes playing in fallen leaves in the fall to owls to the Cheshire Cat to skeletal trees to just huge eyes coming out of the page. I think they're cool, but I won't burden your eyes. I will, however, include these full page doodles, because I couldn't resist:

That's me flying a kite with the boy I went out with briefly admit many Greek gods and my dog. You know, the usual.
Depicted: Apollo, Zeus, Hermes, Dionysus, a leopard, squirrel, dolphin, and other awesome fauna.

This is really an inside joke, and I know those are not cool, but at least you'll get the RIP Werther reference. ;-)