I want to start by saying that I am sorry if these every day posts with our faces and the mundane elements of our day to day are seriously boring haha. Well I am and I’m not. My original intent was just to take a picture of my face and this was because:
1) I think it would be interesting to see how and if my face changes over a year.
2) I’m not comfortable in front of a camera so it’s kind of nice to let go of that insecurity. Maybe next year I’ll do full-length body shots. I need to be comfortable that way too. Baby steps.
I added in the “what we did today” stuff because:
1) It was just a natural step. Why not?
2) I think it would be funny to see exactly what we DID all year. Like were we lazy? Were we busy? Was this a good year or a bad one? I think we tend to paint a year with a broad brush “good” or “bad”. I’m pretty sure this is going to be a tough year so I’ll be tempted to paint it with a “bad”. But if I look back on the days I’ve had so far, they’ve all been “good” or “nice” with only like one or two “bad”.
The interesting thought I had was this:
Me and Kristyn were talking last night about how it’s funny that you forget so much stuff in your life. The only memories you ever really hold onto are kind of stored in your brain as a picture and then the events are kind of words around that picture. Okay well let me back up. Kristyn was reading an article about Susan Sontag and in it, Susan was talking about the power of photography. She was specifically talking about war photography. How powerful of a medium it is. Like when wars are going on, on other people’s soil, if there isn’t a picture of it, we can’t feel it or imagine it. And how even one picture of one moment in time can encapsulate a moment and so perfectly sum the moment up AND give you an understanding of what happened.
So then we started talking about how your life is reduced to a series of small pictures in your head of events that took place. Conversely, we tend to hand onto the memories that we actually HAVE physical pictures of. Because the camera is doing the work that our memory does. Like if our brains are a filing cabinet for memories stored as images with words attached, photographs are like forcing your brain to recall a memory. Even if you forget that moment because it didn’t make that big of an impression, if there is a picture, you will be drawn right back into that moment and (for the most part) remember that day.
So I don’t know that a picture of my face a day will bring back startling vivid memories of me watching Buffy and playing Harry Potter Lego but in a way, I will have at least one year of my life that I know what happened every day. One year with a light shined on it. One year that doesn’t go hazy with memory. That’s kind of a nice thought. That said, I really need to get a job if I want this “memorable year” to be any kind of good memory haha. MOMMA NEEDS MONEY AND TO GET OUT OF THE HOUSE SOME!
Th’sall.
P.S. Speaking of shit that happened, a woman just tried to walk into my house. Our apartment is on ground level and we don’t have a lot of windows so I keep the front door open with just the screen door closed. My front door opens out into our courtyard. SO if you walk into the courtyard, you can see right into my apartment and me sitting here. These two women came into the courtyard, came up to my screen door, talked to my cats and went to open the (locked) screen door to walk right in. I was like, “Can I help you?” She said, “Here’s an invitation to you from the Baptist Church!” I said, “Okay, you can leave it right there” so she stuck it in the door haha. *sigh* We need to move.
Buberella 