In Praise of the Historian Homies
My friend, B, recently admitted to being a “text hoarder.” Despite the self-effacing phrasing, I find this label so endearing. This condition of hers came up when I was trying to find a video from my boyfriend’s 30th birthday. I was dismayed to find that my copy of the video was wiped when I got a new phone. But thanks to B’s instinct for preservation, I was able to recover the clip from her personal archive. By which I mean our text thread on her icloud :)
This has me thinking about how unpredictable yet valuable it is to record and save day-to-day experiences. As a self-described diarist, I sometimes wonder if this hobby is a navel-gazing waste of time. Especially because my format of diarism tends to vary. In some seasons of life I’m vlogging nonstop (like Christine and Tolga from the docuseries Trust Me: False Prophet), sometimes I’m making daily sketchbook entries, most often I’m hand-writing journal entries, and then other times I’m frantically typing out quick blog posts like this one. I’ve even dabbled in trying out documentary audio recordings! Since I keep switching, I often worry that I will never have a cohesive portfolio or a thorough volume of my “work,” whatever that is.
But this brief panic about losing a random 30-second video— and the relief of B saving a copy— taught me that you never know which artifacts of the past will become precious to you or to someone else. So we might as well preserve what we can in whatever medium captures the “texture” of the moment most authentically. (NTS: The concept of “texture” as like an abstract yet tangible feeling communicated through art is another thing I want to write about sometime soon.)
The medium, too, will tell you things about what the world was like when you recorded. For example, when I look back at sketches made in my travel sketchbook, I remember sitting in a German cafe with my family, luxuriating in the spare time to pull out my supplies and paint with loved ones around. When I see the vertical iphone video from my boyfriend’s party, I rejoice that people were excited enough to take videos, but too in-the-moment to bother with more formal camera setups. I feel a similar fondness for old clips from 2016-2017 that I downloaded from snapchat. Sure, it’s not high quality enough to make a cinematic documentary of my life, but it’s a reminder of exactly what we were doing and how we did it in times past.
So, cringey or not, I’m always thankful for the “smile for a quick photo” mom-friends, the historian homies, and the amateur archivists who pay monthly subscriptions for cloud storage. May our memories last forever.
An example of an accidental historian moment. This snapchat photo was taken in 2018. You can see me, standing in my favorite on-campus cafe (hallowed grounds), wearing my favorite sweater (tiger sleeve from H&M), with an armful of my favorite study snack (Joe’s jalapeno kettle chips). My makeup is done in the quintessential bold-eyebrow, matte lip style of that era.
