The assignment was Create your own alphabet, and our art teacher, Mrs. L, showed us slides of letters made to look like animals, like buildings, like fruits. A giraffe like an h, a skyscraper like an l, a banana like a j. In her Casual Friday polo and jeans, before a chalkboard covered with magnets and student work, Mrs. L told us to design a pictorial alphabet or a unique font. Her instructions, she said, were open to interpretation, but we needed to make twenty-six different images that correlated to the letters of the English alphabet.   

I was sixteen and deeply in love—with television. So "love" might not be the right word, but I would doodle cartoons based on the M*A*S*H reruns I watched after school, and chatter on about this wonderfully strange new sitcom called The Office, and I'd arrange my Saturday night plans around information from that week's TV Guide: if there was a new episode of Saturday Night Live that week, I needed to be home by 11:30. I didn't care if the bonfire hadn't been lit yet or if my friends were carpooling to an all-night diner for milkshakes. I was departing by eleven and landing on the floor in front of my parents' TV in time to see the local news anchors throw to the cold open.

Mrs. L said she couldn't quite visualize what an SNL alphabet would look like, but I told her I'd be fine. I showed her the first two letters I'd made and assured her I'd do some research if I needed more ideas.

Pleased by the first two pieces of my alphabet, I showed my classmates. But most of them didn't watch SNL. They were at the bonfire, or the diner, when it aired. Some of them much preferred, they'd intone, MADtv. Instead of inviting others to join in on my enthusiasm by, say, labeling the letters with some information, I decided to turn the project into an alphabetic trivia game.

Classmates, many of whom wouldn't or couldn't wade through my scribbles, told me the whole thing made no sense: What were the letters? What did they represent? The letter acts as a person, I would say, tangling the vines as I grew them. Then: The F holds a cowbell. Can you think of a cast member whose first or last name starts with F?

I used a sloppy mishmash of markers, paint, stencils, cotton swabs, a safety razor, and construction paper to make identical logos on the back of each card. This process ate up big chunks of time, and I felt like a moron three months later when I learned about block printing. But it was nicely repetitive to use cotton swabs to dab little white stars, one by one, and little yellow windows, two by two, on matching circles of construction paper. It was slow, meditative work. I was a junior in high school and there were many thoughts to be thought: college, careers, money. I hated my little small-town high school and, like so many teens growing up in the sticks, I held very glam and utopian views of cities like New York and Chicago. I'd been telling people—the guidance counselor, interested teachers, whoever asked—that I wanted to, one day, be a writer for SNL, and as I dabbed the little yellow windows, my brain flashed little thoughts like maybe one day, me, one window? My face would flush, embarrassed, at these thoughts. It still does.

I also made a box to store the cards. Fourteen years later, the glue has crumbled, the box has dissembled. To capture the below image, I nudged its pieces together on the bed of a scanner.

From the start, the project was a mess: all wild ambition and mismatched materials, a perfect self-portrait of the artist as a sixteen-year-old. It's even more dilapidated now, with its crumbled glue and sun-bleached construction paper. I should probably throw the whole thing out, but I can't seem to manage it.

*

After completing fourteen trivia cards, it was time to give up on finishing the project. My peers were moving on to the next assignment, and I was stuck in a quagmire of cotton swabs and construction paper scraps and glue stains and note cards scrawled over with catch phrases. Mrs. L took me aside and was gentle but honest: I was behind pace, and all I had made were some accessorized block letters.  

We talked near the far wall of the classroom, next to a row of short bookshelves loaded with old magazines. A large mirror hung above the shelves, and a strip along the ceiling was lined with "senior paintings," squares of wall that graduating students were granted for a small mural of their choosing. Some alums would visit just to have a look at them, like relatives visiting a family plot in a cemetery.

Above the magazines and below the squares, Mrs. L said it seemed to her that I'd gotten excited by the opportunity to learn more about the history of SNL and had wandered away from the original assignment. And, most importantly, I looked miserable: each day, I'd spend half the class period hunched over our classroom's tan desktop computer, with its clacky, grimy keyboard and long tube monitor, scrolling through websites dedicated to the history of SNL, grunting when a lead for a new card fizzled out. The web pages were image-heavy, and they loaded slowly. I'm sure I didn't look cheerful.

She asked: Did I really want to finish all 26 letters? She said it would really be fine with her if I called it quits and moved on. But a little voice in the back of my head pouted: But maybe one day, me, one window?

And besides the thought of me, one window, some parts of the project still delighted me. I used real string for the computer mouse (above). I used real fake gems for the glasses (below). I was very proud of these things.

I told Mrs. L how proud I was of the string and the gems and she said she was very concerned. She went to my cubby, pulled out my portfolio, and showed me a portrait I had drawn from a photograph of my late grandmother. It was very good. It had, if I remember correctly, won recognition from an art show at a local community college. But I felt so empty when I looked at that portrait. She said this, to me, seems like something to be proud of. I felt nothing.

Lots of people are quick to dismiss art education, but day after day, Mrs. L taught us these kinds of lessons: about sunk-cost fallacy; about the risks of following your excitement away from your goal; about the risks of following your goal away from your excitement; about the differences between "meaningful," "beautiful," and "clever"; about how pieces of construction paper are not going to get you any closer to me, one window.

I agreed with her, quit the project, and moved on with the rest of the class.

Now, writing (well, re-writing) this essay, I'm in my thirties. I spent my twenties chasing various goals and various excitements and various iterations of me, one window: moves to the east coast and the deep south, reams of new hire paperwork, graduate school, one million applications. Big dreams, big cities, big opportunities, all that crap. Sometimes I failed, sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I'd look at a success and feel empty. Sometimes I'd look at a failure and smile.

*

Last week, my partner invented a character named Forrest Grump, who is just like how he sounds: "My mom always said life was like a box of spiders," he said, as Grump. "And some of them are gonna bite you."

In hindsight, my decision to turn the alphabet project into a trivia game interests me because it, in some ways, mirrored the constant questions I was fielding about jobs, careers, and college. People were asking, Where do you see yourself ten years from now? And I would say, I know you've never really watched this particular show, but can you think of a cast member whose first or last name starts with F? Two impossible guessing games, pointed in opposite directions.

I'm well past ten years from now—it's been more like fifteen years. If you were to go back in time and tell sixteen-year-old me that I would eventually find happiness in a largely clerical job just a few miles from the hospital where I was born, sixteen-year-old me would probably call you a liar. There's no glamorous city, no me, one window. Me still happy.   

Sixteen-year-old me would also be dismayed to know that some of my favorite SNL sketches, ones I considered absolute masterpieces, have fallen into obscurity. For example, the "W" card (below) represents Will Forte, as Ken "The Falconer" Mortimer, in "The Falconer." This sketch recurred nine times between 2002-2006, and it was wildly underappreciated, just like Forte's 2015-2018 sitcom The Last Man on Earth. Both "The Falconer" and Last Man explore the extremes of isolation and companionship, of mere survival and material excess. They're cosmically hilarious and brutally bizarre. I loved them; I still do.

Other things sixteen-year-old me would be horrified by: that I haven't watched SNL in years, that I go to bed at nine, that my favorite comedy sketch isn't even from SNL, it's from MTV's early-90's The State.

Known as "Froggy Jamboree," that sketch opens on a close-up of a young Thomas Lennon, who introduces the name of the sketch, then says "The rest of The State didn't like it, and they sort of got sick of us asking to do it, so we said, 'Can we do it under the credits?' And they said, you know, 'Do whatever the hell you want to do.'" Cut to a wide shot, and he's standing in a plastic kiddie pool with Kerri Kenney-Silver. They're wearing stretchy green bodysuits and big white frog-eye goggles. They dive into a tune, him with a banjo and her with a washboard and jug; she stamps her left foot to the beat, splashing up water.

As they strum, blow, dance, and splash, the credits roll over them, and the cast and crew ignore them, walk around them, yell good-bye to each other, pick up amps and lights, pack the equipment van. But Lennon and Kenney-Silver don't care, even as the microphones are unplugged and their sound falls away: they're doing this thing they really wanted to do, and they're doing the hell out of it. I bet they'd like my little piece of string and real fake gems.

__

Answers: M: Molly Shannon as Mary Catherine Gallagher, Superstar. C: Dana Carvey as The Church Lady, "Church Chat." F: Will Ferrell as Gene Frenkle, "VHI Behind the Music: Blue Öyster Cult," a.k.a. "Recording Session," a.k.a. "More Cowbell." G: Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna, "Weekend Update." O: Conan O'Brien as staff writer and occasional sketch extra. J: Jimmy Fallon as Jarret, "Jarret's Room." S: Horatio Sanz as Sir Elton John, "Weekend Update." D: Rachel Dratch as Debbie Downer, "Debbie Downer." A: Fred Armisen as Prince, "The Prince Show." K: Chris Kattan as Mango, "Mango!" H&P: Darrell Hammond as Regis Philbin & Amy Poehler as Kelly Ripa, "Live with Regis & Kelly." R: Maya Rudolph as Donatella Versace, "VERSACE." W: Will Forte as The Falconer, "The Falconer." T: Tracy Morgan as Brian Fellows, "Brian Fellows' Safari Planet."