The examined life

The bit of Avenue Q that always makes me gulp very hard is the line in “I Wish I Could Go Back To College” (hell, that song is triggering enough) when Princeton sings “I wish I had taken more pictures…”  Because there are almost no photographs at all of my seven years indentured to higher education.  In fairness, a lot of that stems from the fact that there wasn’t very much worth taking pictures of, and my lack of memories is more painful than my lack of evidence – but I don’t remember even having a camera between high school and the ill-starred purchase of one of those Advanced Photo System cameras in 1997, which itself barely lasted a year before going askew under circumstances unremembered. (I chalk it up to 1998 generally.)

My then-girlfriend bought me a digital camera around…when? 2002? 2003? It was a birthday present, and it got some use, though I don’t know what ever became of it.  I’m sure I took some shots on the honeymoon trip, but I don’t recall…but the point is, that was a 2.1 megapixel camera.  And in 2007, I took possession of my first iPhone…with its own 2 megapixel camera.

Now, it wasn’t as good a camera, obviously. No optical zoom at all, no flash, and certainly no prospect for video recording.  But it was a camera that I had on me.  As with flasks and pistols, so with cameras: the one you have on you when you need it is infinitely better than the highly superior featureful model sitting in your drawer back at home.  And yet, with 2 MP and poor focus and no flash and no HDR mode to help clean up and no video for a pinch, “I have it with me” was the only real feature it presented.

If you look through my iPhoto library, though, there’s a huge spike in pictures in 2010, even correcting for the import of my wife’s pics of the trip to Europe that year. (When you correct for her pictures during The Summit, the historic weeklong visit of Team Black Swan East en route to their eventual emigration, 2009 is of a piece with 2008.) No, in mid-2010, I upgraded to the iPhone 4, which offered HD video capture, an LED flash, and – most importantly – an improved auto-focus-capable 5 MP camera.  The picture totals go WAY up.  And then in 2012, the phone gets warranty-replaced with the iPhone 4S, which improved to an 8 megapixel camera, and that’s when I start taking pictures all the time.  Sure, you could probably adjust for Twitter and Path and Instagram and Facebook, but the presence of a point-and-shoot replacement in my pocket at all times meant that I finally started taking more pictures.  Landscapes. Cocktails. I have a better record of my life since 2011 than I have of the entire 1990s.

Too, I have blog records going back to 1999.  Not always current, not always frequent, but my life now is on record in ways that it wasn’t before my great regeneration at age 25. And it’s been surprisingly helpful to be able to go back to, say, late 2003 or early 2004 or most of 2007 and 2008, and compare history and see if I’ve learned anything.  But equally important to me, in some ways, is the fact that I have a past now. The black hole has been pushed back; the void in my life is reduced.  I have memories, I have proof, I have fifteen years of experience to look back and say “I remember when” and things I can draw from and build on.  And that, on many levels, has slowly started to patch up the empty place that made me wish I could go back to college.

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