DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Amy Dillon

ENG 484

Troubling Object Project- Part II

9/16/18

 

Disposable Camera Freshman Year

 

When I was younger, in grammar school, I dreamed about what high school would be like.  I have a memory of me jumping on my bed, thinking about the friends I would make; thinking about how things would change, for the better.  For the most part, before my mental illness was diagnosed in high school, things did get better.  There were lots of new people who I met, and who met me.  The best thing about starting high school was that I could start over, and form new relationships with people I had never met before.  That element of high school seemed magical and mystical, along with the Fruitopia machines in the cafeteria, from which I binged on juice in between classes.  I had so much more freedom.  I could take the activities bus home, if I wanted.  I could disobey the dress code and most of the time teachers wouldn’t notice.  I have a vivid memory of exercising my new freedom my bringing a disposable camera to school one day.

 

Disposable cameras seem a thing of the past; most of the selfies I’ve taken over the past ten years have been with the camera of an iPhone.  Pictures from disposable cameras often come out weird: blurred, too much or too little focused; with red-eyed friends, with the point of attention being just a bit too far in the left-hand corner.  The picture that I want to write about has two subjects in the center.  The corners are frayed, and there are probably more than a thousand colors portrayed in the portrait of two males (along with an anonymous hand poking its way through the sphere of center of attention).  You can tell the camera had a flash, because the right side is darker than the left.  The picture is five inches by three and a half inches.

               

The picture is of two boys that I went to school with, until the middle of sophomore year.  That was the point of my high school career when I first transferred.  The picture was taken during freshman year.  The boy on the right had his arm around the shoulder of the boy on the left.  The boy on the left had curly blonde hair, and was wearing a green polo shirt with a black and white stripe across the front.  He was slouched in his chair so that it appeared like he was shorter than the boy on the right.  His right eye was slightly larger than the left, and his right eye was slightly red, in response to the flash of the camera.  The boy to the right had curly, brown, parted hair, and he also had a slight case of red-eye.  He wore a baggy yellow Ralph Lauren polo shirt. The atmosphere was a classroom.  On the right, there was a hand from a girl named Eli, poking its way through the borders of the sides of the photograph.  On the back of the picture are the words written by my friend from high school, Kelly; it reads in neat handwriting:  John Casey and Eddie Larame.  The words cover the backside of the photograph, over the print that is customary with the backside of a photograph, which read: “Kodak Paper.”  The photograph doesn’t have a scent, it is inedible, and it lacks a sound that might be possible if the photograph I am writing about was an element of a Harry Potter book, or movie.  Both sides are smooth to the touch. Even though the photograph is about twenty years old, it is still in pretty good shape.  I guess that is expected with a picture that remains in the back of a photograph filing cabinet for two decades. 

 

That in the photograph that really makes me wonder what the two boys were thinking, what they were talking about, and what was going on around them, is their stature and the look on their faces.  They look happy, but at the same time it looks like, from their facial expression, that something even more exciting than what is happening between them, is going on.  The slouched look of Eddie makes it appear almost like he is intimidated, and John’s arm around his friend makes it look like he is trying to comfort him, from whatever he is intimidated about.  There is a hand poking in from the side, of Eli.  She is reaching for John.  I remember Angela pointed this out when I got the pictures back.  Eli probably did this out of good humor, but it makes me wonder even more what exactly was going on, during that class, among those three (or more?) people. 

 

I wouldn’t brand the two boys strangers, necessarily.  I could put their names to their faces.  I had heard people talk about them before.  In my mind, they belonged to that group of people that was “preppy,” that didn’t belong to the type of people that I went to grammar school with.  The photograph interests me because they portray what I was, to an extent, during that time in my life: happy, yet quiet, and good-humored.

 

The twenty years in which this photograph was at rest held a lot.  Due to my clinical depression, I transferred three times, twice to a private school and once, finally, to a public school.  My depression has led me through a lot of tough times, but at the same time it has made me aware of who I can count on in life.  I remember making a journal, during the years of 2000, 2001, and 2002, in which I let a lot of my thoughts and feelings emerge.  I glued a lot of pictures and clippings in the journal, some being of friends (and enemies) of the past, along with people I admired in my youth, from television and of other forms of media.  I remember posting photographs of different elements of my youth in the journal.  This did not include the photograph of Eddie and John, because I hardly knew them; and that is why their picture went to the file in the back of the cabinet.  Some quotes I included in my journal are:

“Just, lalalalala,

It goes around the word,

Just lalalala,

It’s all around the world,”

 

Along with:

“Under the table and dreaming,” accompanied with my chalk illustrations of ants crossing at a light.

 

I went to school for seven years in order to earn a bachelor’s degree, and throughout that time my paths hardly crossed with Eddie or John, along with a lot of high school classmates.  Right now, I am earning my Masters, and these circumstances still remain. 

               

There isn’t much story behind the picture, but that which there is, is interesting.  One day during my freshman year of high school, I brought a disposable camera, so that to take pictures of my fellow students and the happenings of that which occurred during a school day.  A girl that I used to be friends with, Angela, brought the camera with to her Religion class.  She took some pictures, including the one I am writing about. 

               

I remember looking through the pictures when I first picked them up from Walgreens.  There were a lot of pictures of people I didn’t know and wanted to be friends with.  This picture was one of the more notorious of the results of the camera project, for me; partly because the two boys who were the subjects of the photograph were complete strangers, yet I felt like I had some association with them, at that point, after the picture was taken. 

               

To place myself in the environment of high school again is a difficult thing to do, for one; because eighteen years have passed and some memories are difficult to recall, and two, because that which is able to be recollected is emotionally difficult to remember.  In my experience, depression hits teenagers the hardest, because that is a time in one’s life where you are growing emotionally just as much physically, and depression can stand as such a nuisance in one’s life.  I remember my mental wellbeing becoming worse and worse, all the way until I hit that point in time where I was hospitalized.  Looking back at the memories, clippings, and photographs in my diary, makes me sad, but at the same time it brings me back to a time when things were (or should have been) easier, so it is kind of easing to read through my diary.

               

It’s always interesting to look at pictures of you and your fellow youth during your time together, because so much has changed; including you, them, and, most importantly, the circumstances of life.  I remember the peak of my days as a freshman in high school being lunch, or a class that was laidback so that it was easy to socialize.  A lot has changed.  Things have gotten more difficult for me, as an adult, but at the same time, I have so much more independence now.  This picture, of two boys that seem sure of themselves with their smiles, and the pacific look in their eyes, shows how much things can change, yet at the same time, remain the same. 

                       

This object, this photograph, troubles me because it reminds me of all that I had left behind when I transferred.  In the middle of sophomore year of high school, I was diagnosed with clinical depression.  I went to the hospital for a week and then I transferred to an all girl’s Catholic school, one where I had friends from grammar school.  It took a few years for things to start to get normal again for me, and I oftentimes wish to go back in time and do things over.  I wonder, a lot, if there was something I could have done at my first school so that I wouldn’t have had to transfer.  The first school I went to was also a private Catholic school, but it was co-ed, meaning that, before my transfer, I used to have the opportunity to socialize with boys, along with girls, during school hours.  This picture troubles me because, although the two males in it are relatively strangers to me, I think of how I could have been friends with them, had I not been diagnosed with clinical depression.

               

One thing I wonder about is what these two portrayed males used to think of me.  Their expressions could be considered poker faces, they could be considered cold, they could be expressions expressing the possibility that maybe they wondered about me, too.  This picture is troubling because it reminds me of what I could have had with them, and others like them. 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.