Uh oh. I’ve started to think about documentation. Like most people of my generation, there are a few relics of evidence that the lives of my parents existed before I was born, but not many. Mostly sepia-toned roundy-cornered photographs in scrap books, and a few big-event posed pictures propped in silver frames on my grandparent’s glass end tables.
Of course, things are entirely different now. I have a ton of instant camera photos from camping trips in high school, then a bunch of digital pictures mostly lost during college, then a whole slew of Flickr pictures, and a growing collection of Facebook pictures. Not to mention the just-starting-to-get-warmed-up collection of awkward Flip and iPhone videos that don’t quite know where they want to be stored yet.
I still haven’t heard of a single newborn who has been photographed every day of his/her life. I’m sure they exist, though, somewhere on the internet. It’s not only possible, but pretty easy to do, and imagine if you had a picture of every day of your life, from the very beginning. Would you have a different understanding of yourself if you had records that precise? Not just the big things, but also the small things, the insignificant things, the forgettable things.
I’m not saying that I’m going to do this with the future baby in our lives, but I do have to at least talk myself out of it. Because recording everything is my default starting point, and everything less than that is an exercise in practicality.
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