I’m Doing This Wrong
I’m doing this wrong. When I came up with the name for this project, I based it on something I had used to name my collection of photographs on my cell phone. I started calling them my “Joy Diary.” I found that scrolling through them would give me an experience of joy. The photos served as an exquisite distillation of the most happy and interesting moments of my life — reminders of people, events, travel, and other blessings.
Of course not every photo is joyful and some are even about loss and grief. A relatively new phenomenon is of the plainly pedestrian photographs, those that serve a documentary function, such as where I parked my car, the grocery list, or the letter I’ve emailed because why should I fax it? These oddly also give me joy, mostly, I suppose, because I’m not of a generation where these solutions are obvious, and each one is like a small revelation of a different way of thinking.
Some readers may scoff — why aren’t you using Grocery 2.0 or ¿Dude, Where’s My Car? Beta, but dear reader, this would be to miss something grand and important: a scrawled list or a signpost may be outdated technologies, but they are technologies nonetheless, and often more efficient. It is not a decision, always, between a brave new world and a prelapsarian Eden. The two are written grandly over the same landscape.
Was Eden landscaped?
But back to what I’m doing wrong. When I named this project, I didn’t think of the difference between writing and (amateur) photography. There is plenty in my life that isn’t joyful, but these moments are not often the subject of my photography. Photography can be bland or Bierstadtian, and everything in between, but my photography is curated in advance — there is surely a way to say that better — by my own preference for marking moments of joy. I suppose more importantly, I haven’t opened up my entire photographic oeuvre for public consumption.
Writing this blog is different, not because writing and photography compete as art forms, but rather because I am not willing to restrict my subject to only joyful moments. Even the most saccharin of artists knows that would be folly. And, as in my opening, I am a poet more of elegy. To discover joy is a goal of this journey, but I won’t do so by culling out the rest.
And this is how I failed, by choosing a name for this project that doesn’t hint at the dark corners and depths of my documentary project. I am, like Greenland, guilty of false advertising.
And why not change the name?
It’s a good question with a dull answer. The process of securing a registered domain and finding a functional home for it was very far from a joyful experience. It’s true that diaries only offered erasure and intense scribbling as a means of covering error. But, as a technology, they might have been better, at least in some ways, than what replaced them. They were easily more democratic, though probably not less vainglorious.
And so, like a clasp or a cheap lock, this is your invitation to exit before entering. In truth, I’ll be glad to have you along. One of my failings as a writer is my ill suited extroversion. Such a lonely business, this.
