Memory, My Memory, I Need You to Inspire Me

I survived the first day of classes! And I came home and baked cupcakes for a friend’s birthday on top of that! If only I’d gotten off my duff and gone to the gym this morning, then I’d feel on top of the world. Oh well.

I promise this post won’t be a boring recollection of my hourly adventures on campus. Instead I've got an assignment to share. I’ve come to learn that for one of my film classes (the particularly long one that runs from 5:00-6:30 in the evening), it’s required that the students keep a journal of their ideas. Just any ideas that come to us that pertain to projects. I’ve been told that only a few will be really reviewed and turned in, so I though to myself, why not post the thoughts here? By posting my thoughts here, it’s following the spirit of my professor who would rather see the whole class go paperless (although I really couldn’t function if I were told I couldn’t handwrite my lecture notes).

So here’s the project. Using less than 15 black and white still photographs—taken with a 35mm camera, mind you—we are to tell a story. Oh, but not just any old story. This story has to have some certain special importance to the author. The story must derive from a memory.

The first thing that comes to mind: my life is boring. I have no story from my memory to tell.

But then as lecture goes on and I’m gawking at all the supplies we’re going to have to buy for the projects for this class, a few things come to me. As a kid I fell off a horse. One of my cats died recently. I’ve shot more deer than I can remember when hunting with my dad. It took a good thirty seconds for me to realize that none of these will prove good stories, seeing as I have no access to livestock, I have no desire to attempt to train my remaining felines to lie still and play dead, and it is not deer season.

So I mull it over. I lean over and ask one of my friends why on earth we should pay $100 for a script-writing program that we’ll use once for this class. I think to myself, “You want to be a screenwriter, you’ll use it.” I still question why we have to spend $100. It isn’t until nearly an hour later that I remind myself that this is technically an art class, and they were always expensive in high school.

I think of the drama I encountered in high school and decide against it, knowing many of my fellow high school students followed me to my college. I go further back. I think of how I was in Science Olympiad for 5 years, and all the crazy-sciencey things I did. For fun. (For those who don’t know, Science Olympiad is basically science club, but instead of partaking in a science fair, we compete in certain events that encompass some math or science skill against other schools.) There were countless times when we spent hours practicing only to go to competition and fail. Tears and heartbreak. Oh what little nerds we were…but I loved it and miss it now.

I think that the Science Olympiad idea may require too much building (reconstructing old projects) or too much explanation to squeeze into 15 pictures. I go home, check the mail, my roommate cooks for me (for the first time and I’m estatic!), and I bake cupcakes. I think some more.

I think of things that scared me as a child. I remember being afraid to lock bathroom doors—really any doors—because I thought I’d get trapped inside. This happened to me in a paint-your-own-pottery place when I was in elementary. I was banging on the door and nearly in tears by the time the handle jiggled free, only to find everyone staring at me when I escaped. I think this could be an interesting story if I tweaked it and heightened the dramatics a bit.

Stuff evidently has happened in my life, I just fail to remember any of it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve got a difficulty opening up and sharing my life with others—complete strangers, really. I love art and I take pride in my work, but to rip myself open like that and lay it all out on a table for potentially a whole auditorium of strangers to see, it’s hard! Alas, this just means I'll have to spend a lot of time lying around eating the remaining cupcakes and being inspired by life. So difficult, but some how I'll manage it, just you wait and see.