I love margins. I love padding. I love white space. How much, you ask?
A funny thing happened to me at SDCC. In case you were unaware, comicon is fucking insane. My situation at comicon was even more insane. We had a work deadline that Friday and so my time off request got revoked the week before. Fuck that.
I went to work all week at 7am, finished up everything, hopped on the freeway at 4:30pm, not announcing my departure to management, and arrived in San Diego at 7:30pm. I set an email to send a few more documents I had "just finished" and a sick note to everyone at the company at 10am the next day. I finally reached my friends at 9pm. We drank until 2am. Then we Ubered to the house we had rented. Then we drank more and partied until 5am. Then we slept until 9am. Then we had 12 people shower in 2 bathrooms for a couple hours. Then we went to a massive convention in humid, 90 degree weather until 7pm. Then we drank until 2am. Then we ubered to the house we rented. Then we partied until 5am. Repeat. Repeat again. You get the idea.
Anyways, on Sunday morning, a crew was going to be leaving earlier to pick up an arrive friend from the train station. I was aware of this and I left my keys on the table so no one would wake my ass up when they moved my car out of the driveway. I don't wake up easily normally. It's exponentially worse when my nose is clogged, my face is greasy, and I've passed out on an air mattress surrounded by 11 other people.
They couldn't find my keys.
So they tried to wake me up. But they didn't. I don't remember anything but allegedly I was yelling at them, "You fucking DUMBDUMBS, you have to look in the margins! Did you look in the goddamn MARGINS?!". Allegedly, this went on for 5-10 minutes - every question they would pose at me would be answered about looking in the fucking margins.
My friend, this guy I was sleeping with, was fully aware of my weird sleep talking and was cracking up. Everyone else was apparently trying to figure out what margins were and where my keys were. When I sleep talk, my tone of voice is very convincing. Unless you are aware that I am in fact speaking gibberish, it's very easy to think that I am totally talking legitimately and you are either misunderstanding or, in most cases, you are in fact a retard. I only know this because my mother filmed me when I was about 9 years old refusing to move from the couch to the bed by telling her "NO RETARD! You have to shoot the arrows THROUGH the flames. Ughhhhhhhh. If you don't want to do it then I'll take care of it...like always."
Anyways. I love margins. And I don't feel like working today. What are you people up to?
Your comicon adventure sounds like about as much fun as an ebola-gargling party. But then, the people I didn't go with sent me selfies with George RR Martin so maybe I'm just jealous. On a completely unrelated note I wonder how much of the fetishism for paper and all its glory parallels the fetishism for album covers and the smell of dust jackets. Yeah, there's a glorious tangibility to it all but it seems to me that if it really mattered all that much, the authors would be a lot more involved in the design and layout of books. And they ain't. Not at all. So what we're left with is a bunch of craftsmen with an unmistakeable skill who would just as happily practice it on 500 pages of lorem ipsum. Meanwhile, the actual content doesn't much care what font it's in, what its padding is or what its margins are. Don't get me wrong. The layout of Douglas Coupland's Generation X was novel and cool. But it was also distracting.