My Paparazzi Phase

Sorry for not posting this Monday. Between finals, coming home, and going to New Haven to see my brother’s graduation, I’ve been hard up for time. 

On that note, the trip to New Haven was amazing. Aside from the obvious joy from seeing my brother graduate the Harvard of Connecticut (which is a cut above my school: the Harvard of the Iowa), it was full of striking images. That comes with the territory, being at an Ivy League University, but even aside from the ancient campus, I was taken by the little house where we stayed. The enormous window in the living room gave a panorama of the ocean and we could hear the tide crashing against the seawall at all hours, both of which gave the impression that we were living on a boat more than a house. Between the interesting setting and the obvious importance of the occasion, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that my dad and grandfather were always sneaking around the edges of the action, snapping photos of every angle of the post-grad interactions. Still, it got on my nerves a little, especially when I was stuck in the awkward situation of realizing that someone is trying to surreptitiously take a photo of you and suddenly becoming very aware of your posture and pose.

Now I’m back in Edina, surrounded by the landmarks and people of my middle and high school years, and I’ve started to realize that getting mad at anyone for taking my picture is sort of hypocritical. After all, for most of my Edina years, I kept a little Flip video camera in my pocket and whipped it out so often that a significant percentage of my adolescence is currently hogging the memory on my family computer’s hard drive. 

I used to tell myself that I filmed just about everything in order to save it and remember it. That’s probably part of it too, I started filming just around the time I started realizing that my memories of my childhood in Waco were fading. My habit came on the heels of a series of nightmares where I was walking around my old house, everything exactly as it had been, until I went into a room that I couldn’t quite remember and found it was a blank white cell with no exit. There definitely was some anxiety about forgetting my life at that time, and a foolproof strategy seemed to be keeping the camera rolling and pointed at things I wanted to remember.

But there was more to it than that. By filming I made a very distinct personality, even earned the briefly-used nickname “random video kid.” In developmental psychology class this year I learned about the metrics for measuring a kid’s social standing, and on that scale I’d probably fall into the “controversial” category, reserved for the rare kid who has some good friends and real enemies. Some people appreciated the novelty of my videography. Weirdness for weirdness’s sake is usually a good bet in middle school. But others, rightly, saw it as an invasion of privacy and sort of creepy. If I hadn’t been me, I probably would have been on their side. But I was me, and as a kid who had spent quite a bit of time in the “neglected” category (no peer perception, positive or negative), any attention was good attention.

The real answer was a combination of the two, I think. I wanted to remember these times, but in a very particular way. I’d turn three months of my life into a three-minute clip show of me and my friends having fun, set to my favorite songs at the time (some of which I still really like and some of which embarrass me to this day). It gave me a sense of authority over my life, not just to remember thing as they happened but to control how I remembered them, and to make a name for myself in the process. There’s a song I’ve been listening to obsessively the past few days, “One Man Wrecking Machine” by Guster, about trying to relive adolescence, not as it really was, but the way it’s portrayed in movies. That really speaks to my mindset at the time. Only I wasn’t just trying to remember it as a movie, I was trying to make it into a movie, one that was bright and silly and constantly moving and that decidedly did not feature all the hours I spent alone in my room playing with Bionicles and doing homework. My friends who were okay with being filmed cooperated by doing something filmable every time I turned the camera on them. One of them even noted in one of my vlogs that it feels like he’s acting. 

But my dad and grandad weren’t manipulating anything when they snuck around snapping photos, they weren’t trying to catch the moments for anything other than what they were. That shouldn’t be surprising, my dad and grandad are wise people, and considerably more mature than I was at 14 (or now than I am now, for that matter). 

Looking back on it, the videos that I still really cherish were the ones where I did the same thing at my dad and grandad, where I captured the moment for what it was. 

It was the summer after ninth grade. My cousin Stephen had died a week before. Most of the family spent the first few days after the death at my grandparents’ house in Grosse Pointe, but the only time we were all together, all of us but Stephen, was when we met up for an informal memorial on the beach of Belle Isle. We sat in a circle, talked about how much we missed him, and threw flowers into the Detroit river. Halfway through we were interrupted by a yellow ice cream truck playing a happy little melody that pulled up a few feet away. It seemed so much like Stephen, a bright and musical and happy thing cutting off the solemn conversation. I filmed it as we were leaving, more out of habit than anything. Then I heard a rhythmic clapping behind me, and I turned around to film and see my brothers and cousins and uncle, marching shoulder-to-shoulder and clapping to the tune. It was silly and strange and tragic, the perfect encapsulation of our memories of Stephen.

That’s something I’m glad to have on video.