Beware the salad

On my first day on campus as a college freshmen, I walked into the dining hall with my roommate, awed by the all-you-can-eat offerings. I thought it would be neat to document my meals during my time in college. Obviously, this project fell through within days (if that? I find only references to this attempt, no entries), as another four-year commitment was untenable for a fledgling high school grad.

A few weeks later, I did actually snap a photo of my "meal", as part of an assignment for a class designed to foster freshmen's' assimilation into the university's regime. It was a salad. It was pitiful.

(Did I not know how salads were supposed to look? Where's the dressing?! I have no explanation...)

I felt instantly embarrassed and put my phone away. Was I being basic? Cliché? This small moment sparked a larger question I've pondered ever since: Why do we photograph our experiences, and when does it become ridiculous?

Document the mundane

One of the best things in life is looking through old photos. Perhaps we're in the twilight of the days of flipping through albums, but we can at least scroll past the accidental screenshots and pictures of the floor and appreciate the moments we want to ephemerally relive. Do we want to relive the meal at the Cheesecake Factory? Burger King?

I look to a paraphrased excerpt from a journal entry dated years ago:

It's odd to hear my voice. No longer unbearable though. What I can't do is see myself in a picture or video. Maybe that's a reason as to why I struggle to take pictures of myself. Others taking it has gotten better. I should have more pictures of myself.

We can take a few things from past me:

1. Seeing or hearing yourself, or reading your previous words might make you cringe. The process of documenting is also cumbersome. It could be uncomfortable or even unbearable. Yet, it gets easier the more you do it.
2. If one medium doesn't work for you, try another, then return and try both. I'm most comfortable with words, but the more ways you can document your life, the more ways in which you can reflect on it.
3. Although I phrased it as a future issue, the lack of documentation (pictures) was upsetting.

The picture isn't the point

My salad, on its own, is only mildly interesting by its inherent grossness. But I'm grateful that its picture exists because it evokes a memory of talking with my classmates that day. So your friends may not care about the picture of your meal, nor your Instagram followers, but you should care. Similarly, probably nobody wants to watch your cellphone recording of fireworks, but keep it for yourself and remember the night. Just make sure you're living now and document for later, not obsessing over the perfect picture or worrying whether it's meaningful enough to save. It is.

It's not ridiculous

It's not ridiculous to want to save a little bit of now for when you need it later. That's something that took me a while to see (for a while, I thought why should I ever care about what I ate one day), but since I have, I've found it incredibly rewarding to access my archive of pictures, journal entries, little notes from some seemingly insignificant event. Write ten words, take a bad picture, record your voice for a few seconds talking about your day— you'll care about it later even if you don't now.