Jason Tolbert is a multimedia designer, developer, and manager currently working for Accenture Shanghai in China an e-learning director. "I have two art degrees, but I've been working in office environments for the past eleven years," Jason writes. "Often, my suppressed artist's urge to draw comes out spontaneously in the form of phone doodles which become surprisingly elaborate. Recently, I've taken up drawing and doodling again more seriously, the way I did when I was a high school student, at a desk with a lamp on, drawing with complete disregard to art theory. This time, though, I post them online and share them with my friends with no particular agenda for recognition. I think this indifference to anything outside the act of drawing while engaging in drawing is one of the most important and enjoyable things one can cultivate."

Bard writes: Jason and I went to the same school, Hereford High School, in Parkton, Maryland. He was a tenth grader when I was a senior and somehow no matter how old I get, and how relative age seems to have become, the tenth graders I knew will always remain, in some weirdly abstract way, tenth graders, although the photos I've seen on Facebook should be evidence enough that this is not the case.

This past December, though I am in Memphis, TN and Jason is in China, we learned of the passing of Barry Hamilton, who was our art teacher at Hereford. He was a kind and funny and generous man. Being erroneously scheduled for his Studio Arts class when I was technically not eligible to take it (I was a tenth grader) was one of the luckiest things ever to happen to me.

ED. NOTE: It has come to my attention that Jason was in fact a junior when I was a senior, an understandable mistake which I attribute to my general obliviousness to the state of the universe ... and the fact that he hung around with some avowed tenth graders. -- cbc.