http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/14/accidental-documentaries
Documenting your child's life has become an obsession with parents. They want proof that at an early age their kid was the smartest, the fastest, and most dedicated. Even though 99.999% of the youth concerts, t-ball games, or whatever else four year olds can sign up in now days, as adults you have nothing to do with it. The catch is that once every now and again, there's one of the people that actually make something with their life, that actually decide to turn things around and do something amazing with what they were doing when they were five.
I am not one of those people.
If we were to only go by the videos and documentation that my parents have made of me while growing up, I should be an all star swimmer or a professional cellist. I have concerts on top of concerts with more concerts on the side worth of cello music, and then I also had the summer swim teams that I was on and have many hours of my white little legs belly flopping into the pool (seriously, I don't know why I kept swimming, I have the worst start in the history of the world, I love the water part, I just can't get into the water gracefully).
But even those I don't really know if they fit into the world of accidental documentaries, because they're not really catching anything that's normal. They're not catching a conversation with the family, they're getting what's going on, they're just catching one brief glimpse in time where I'm performing or swimming. The thing that really came to my mind when talking about accidental documentaries, is all of my writing.
Sure, it might not work out to be the best on radio, or film, but if you want a glimpse into my brain and what is going on in my mind, you have to read what I write. I think the biggest catch to this is the idea that in documentaries you record until people get so bored of you recording that they start to act normal. Writing as started to do that with me. It has gotten so boring and I've done so much with it, that when I'm doing something like this, I'm just being myself. As much as I wish I could posh this up a bit and sound fancier, this is legitimately how I think and hat is going on in my brain.
I blame it on early years having to journal write. For a long time, each sunday (or at least it was supposed to be each Sunday) we had to work on either a baby book (scrap book of pictures) or our journals. Journals got boring, and I hated reading them too because it was always about how that on a certain date a certain thing happened and that was it. There was one relative of mine, that I'm sure if I went back and tried to read that I"d enjoy, but it was just boring to go through because he just talked about how he was traveling to one place to another, and never actually talked about what was going on in his head, what he tohught, how he felt, or anything that was going on in his personal life. It was very much went to A then traveled to B with C. BOOOOORRRRRIIIINNNNGGG And the worst part was that I was following that same track down the journal lane, but then my teenage years hit and I started to write what I felt. Screw the date, screw the happenings of the day (seriously, I doubt that anyone wants to know what was happening in high school with teenage me), I wrote what I was feeling, what I was going through, and whatever drama (no matter how lame and adolecent) was in my life. I wrote about what mattered to me, and that's how it's been ever since.
It might not be the most interesting documentary, but if you want an insight into my life and my thoughts, just read anything that I've ever written that I haven't had to turn in for a grade. The less I think that someone else is going to read it, the more I write like me.
Side note at the end of this - WOW people went crazy reading about the list. Either one person checked my blog on every computer they could find, or just. . . wow. Way to shock a person guys.
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