I set out to write a good blog post today and was instantly
stumped.
“Don’t write another surface level update about the family.
I’m tired of that.” To which I responded, “Alright then, what do you want to
write about?”
“I don’t know. Something with a point.”
“Like a plot?”
“Yeah. A story with a plot.”
So then I sat quietly and thought for an hour. A few years
ago I started compiling a list of stories to tell because my mind always goes
blank when someone says, “Laura! Tell me a story!”
Most of the stories I have, I have told already and a lot of them
are too long for a blog post or they require accents, demonstrations, and facial expressions. The Story List consists only of keywords to jog my
memory of the tales and over the last eight years of compiling, a lot of the
keywords do nothing to spark my recollection of the stories I deemed
worthwhile. So I scrolled way back through my computer and found old blurbs I
started writing when I was sixteen. They consisted of the trivial nonsense that
teenagers worry about that seems so monumental at the time. Wouldn’t it be interesting
to read a list of everything that ever bothered and worried you? I imagine you
wouldn’t remember 90% of those occasions. On the other hand, a few of the
documents had bits of insight in them and the early stages of personalities
beginning to form. I noted things Ellen was doing that at the time were
annoying or weird but are now fully developed components of how she analyses
and processes information. Things that seemed like angstiness back then were
actually kids forming their own opinions about life, and a bit of angstiness.
The best find was an enormous document that was Ari and my
correspondence for the entire year she spent in Scotland. I was seventeen and a
disinterested senior in high school and Ari was a college freshman, cold and
alone on the windy Scottish coast. More than half of it was each of us missing
the other and wishing we were together to endure all the boredom and newness of
things. It took Ari some time to make friends and adjust to British living. She
was lonely often and far more deep and poetic than the partiers she was
surrounded by. I was bored with my vacuous friends and enduring a “He said She
said” style “You have to choose a side.” kind of friendship split for the first
time. My life has always been surprisingly drama-free so these things made for
interesting analysis when I got home and reabsorbed my day. I wasn’t interested in either side to be
honest and that made me a suspicious target to which both sides bonded over and
I wound up being left out - and only bummed about being left out approximately
every sixth weekend or so. I found lots of fulfillment in the time I spent
outside of school.
What I found most interesting about our messages is how
uninteresting they are. My messages to Ari were about walking dogs, hanging
out with my parents, and updating her on the cute college guy that lived across
the street at the time. Her messages contained lists of movies she had watched,
how the weather was in Scotland, and the annoying habits of her roommates. I
often look back at the years between 13 and 20 and have no recollection of what
I was doing at the time. I know lots of people peak at that point in life, or
have a grand first romance, or have something important to note on being a
teenager. I don’t remember anything, including the classes I spent a year
studying or the names of my “teachers” or what sorts of things my friends were
interested in. Reading the Scotland File jogged my memory of the fruitlessness
of that time. I was just waiting around to be set free and rolling my eyes at
the hoops I had to jump through to get there. (So, not much has changed.)
I read about Ari’s winter there in Scotland and watched
slowly as names she mentioned in passing became good friends as the year went
on. She started to miss summertime and warm beaches and Jazz music and decided
she wanted to come home and live in New Orleans right around the same time that
I was accepted into SCAD and annoyed that now I'd have to go to college. This is all
interesting to me because the pointless things are indicators of future things and
the things that mattered then don’t even register on the scale of valuable
thoughts. A lot of that Scotland File reminded me of this book I tried to read
by an angsty Portuguese man named Fernando Pessoa who was born in 1888 and was
bored with life. He scribbled notes and thoughts he had throughout the day into
a little notebook and sometime after he kicked the bucket, someone published
his book of notes. Sometimes I wonder if he minds this.
There is no real plot to the book. It’s simply the things a
human noticed while they carried on through their day and for that reason, I
never made it through the book, though what I did read was eerily relatable for
the large time gap and made the mundane things of life sound a lot more poetic than they
feel.
So here I’ve written another plotless post. I’ve decided that
next month I won’t do a single introspective post. By golly, they’ll all have a
plot.
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