November 25, 2010

• Woke up with a headache and had a fight about an apartment.

  
  illustration by Lina Ekstrand

  C has been looking for a place and he was pretty sure he found one. He was so excited. But when I looked at the pictures he'd taken I realized the place was far too small - easily smaller than this by 100 sq feet. And no counter space and no room for an extra dresser or a desk. It was a sweet little place, but for $400 more a month I couldn't bring myself to agree. And I am the bitch again. 

  I have to get out of this place - I want to get out of here - but I'm so afraid of waking up somewhere and thinking, What the hell have I done? It's the trap of living in an apartment for 9 years; I'm working off standards a decade out of date. 

  In other news (not really) I keep seeing these ads for the Windows 7 Cloud photo editor. The commercial shows the exasperated mom, frustrated at her family's inability to sit for a photo with uniform smiles and poses. She gets very excited at her ability to use the new photo editor to make a sort of photographic hybrid. She swaps out the "best" heads from other photos, amalgamating the acceptable expressions to create a single perfect image. 

  OF AN EVENT THAT NEVER HAPPENED.

  You know, it's a bit bad enough that we're all looking at the world from the other end of a lens - a phone, a digital camera, a webcam. I adore photography, but the fact is, a lot of us spend so much time trying to get the perfect picture of an event, we don't really experience it first hand anymore. We rely on the photo to remind us - even to show us - what it is that happened. How often have I looked back over my image files and thought, Wow, I barely remember this? And how often have I stood somewhere and consciously decided not to take out my camera because I didn't want to miss what was happening in my search for better light or angles?

  I remember sitting with my dad a few weeks ago, going through an old album I found on a forgotten shelf. It was filled with pictures of his childhood and the years between leaving home and meeting my mom. Dad's an old man now, on the edge of 80. I can barely remember half my 20s, so it's no shock his recollections are foggy. I turned the pages and he pieced together his youth using the pictures as clues. "This must be at the dairy," he'd say, pointing at the group of young Turks holding beer bottles. "We all lived there while were were apprenticing." Another picture was his first apartment with a friend; I watched him struggle to retrieve the details.

  Because eventually, pictures become our memories. We rely on them to remind us of things we've forgotten. They are, after all, evidence.

  Until you start manufacturing pictures of things that didn't happen - because, you know, it's prettier. And then you wake up at 80 and never remember how cute it was that Stevie and Tommy couldn't sit still for a picture that one year.

  This is some creepy shit, people. You may as well put on It's a Wonderful Life and call it home movies.

  g.

   

   

  • 9:48 am
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