Bagged and tagged

Much is made of boys and the things they collect. Entire cultural reference points revolve around mint-on-card Boba Fett action figures and obscure 78 rpm vintage jazz recordings, and the airless, dust-jacketed worlds that grown men build around their reflex to hoard and catalog defunct moments of cultural perfection.

We accept that women as a gender mostly do not covet their childhood collectibles. Typical things that girls acquired are seen as disposable, and have no future cultural resonance. Let's take stickers as a case study. No more disposable and artless than your typical cheap baseball card or mass-produced superhero comic, and yet the thought of an adult woman placing stickers into "golden age" polypropylene archival sleeves with ph-balanced backing boards is laughable. There is no Android's Dungeon of stickers in your hometown. There are no sex comedies about middle-aged sticker collecting spinsters living in their parents' basements. There is no StickerCon.

Like most pre-teen girls, I kept sticker albums, organized by theme and brand, and had distinct opinions about the merits of various designers, e.g., I detested Lisa Frank, purveyor of fussy airbrushed unicorn and Betty Boop fantasy-scapes, essentially the Thomas Kinkade of the sticker world (and yet, the completist within drove me to collect these too).

I can only presume it is by virtue of my gender that I have not turned such experiences into a present way of life. Yet my collection remains, cataloged in part today on tiny dog to honor my fellow females, and their unsung gift for letting go.