It's WIP Week on Chromatic Conflux! I searched through my metaphorical blog post vault and found seven projects that I'm proud of — but may never "finish." So I thought, why not just publish them? Yesterday's post was "The Stories of US Elections: 1789-1852."
It was quarantine and I was bored and I was vain. I had a diary which went back to 2018. I’m young now and I was even younger then. So what else? I started writing a memoir.
But I had some self-awareness, so I called it “the vanity project,” and I knew that I probably wouldn’t finish it. But I think it has some charm. (To be honest, I think it has even more charm in the thumbnail font, IM Fell Great Primer, which is how I wrote it. Including the smallcaps dates! But Wix, annoyingly, doesn’t support other fonts. Alas.)
This is only an excerpt. I made some light edits/redactions for privacy. Enjoy!
the vanity project
a collection of anecdotes written by Jacob M. Cohen that, together, describe the diarized portion of his life
[very unfinished, probably won’t be, but aesthetic]
DISCLAIMER: These stories are based in part on the human memory, which is inherently flawed. Therefore, the events described may not have happened precisely as I describe them. No pseudonyms are used; all names are real. In a version of the Vanity Project geared for publication, pseudonyms would likely be used for people not consenting to the use of their actual names.
creation myth
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2018. It was Pi Day, the lowfalutin mathematical holiday about the falsely deified pi, the deity which I then worshipped and memorized eighty digits of. (The next day, I would watch a Vi Hart video about tau, and be converted forevermore.) I walked into math class and the teacher, Natasha, pointed to the whiteboard. On it was an example of a pi-ku. Pi-kus are like haikus, except that the first line has 3 syllables, the second 1, and the third 4. You know, like 3.14. Like pi. Natasha had the members of the class write pi-kus as well. I wrote one about phi, probably better known as the golden ratio. The exact contents of the so-called poem are lost to time, but what’s not is the beautiful lighthearted memory. It was so damned adorable. If you know me, you know that’s not a phrase I toss around.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2018.* A month prior, 17 students had been killed in Parkland, Florida, in a school shooting. Of course, anyone who read the news in that time would have known. What’s more salient to my personal narrative is the School Walkout that, while national, was fully endorsed by my school. It was a 17-minute event to honor the 17 victims of gun violence, a peaceful protest in the streets to help make the world safer. Of course, it’s probably naive to think that my participation, or even the protest at large, had a noticeable impact. But it was inspiring to be part of it.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2018.** The previous November, my friend had an idea for a Google Hangout RPG, where each person could create a character and those characters could have an adventure. (It ended up being mostly about romance.) …In any case, the RPG was now splintering… Some members split off to form the very short-lived Steampunk RPG. This wasn’t just their fault. It was complicated. But the primary RPG was actually such a beautiful work of literature, which I would eventually edit into a novel, probably not of entertainment value to anyone out of this group. That’s later, anyway.
TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 2018. What happened to me on this day? I have absolutely no recollection. As with the preceding Monday, and a huge majority of the days prior. There was only one thing separating Wednesday from the rest, one thing meticulously preserving those beautiful, poignant memories for the rest of time. (Let’s be honest, a little bit more of time.) And that was the diary.
My diary wasn’t (isn’t) like other diaries. First of all, it wasn’t easily intelligible by people other than myself. Hell, it wasn’t all that intelligible by myself. The way it worked was that I would record the date, along with a few keywords relating to the day’s events. This, hopefully, would instantly bring to mind the paragraphs you see before me, due to the power of memories stored shallow in the hippocampus, needing nothing but the proper keyphrase to conjure up. My handwriting wasn’t beautiful, and sometimes the keyphrases were as generic as “Math Homework.” But if nothing else, the diary produced three memories that it otherwise wouldn’t have. And it produced many, many more.
Just as an example, here’s day one:
Wed 3/14: Pi-kus, the School Walkout, and the Steampunk RPG
TODAY. Now, I won’t cover every moment in this account. Not even every moment I remember. But I’ll try to hit the highlights. It’ll be roughly chronological, but I’ll jump around to tell certain stories as good as I can. Let’s do this.
*Yes, that’s the same date. You’ll see why.
**Still the same date. Patience.
blood frittata
SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2018. My family was hosting a brunch for the family of Zahara Agarwal, who will become fairly important in this story later. But not yet. In any case, I had met Zahara in the pre-diary era, probably fourth grade. My memory of these events are shaky, and I think were exaggerated with time, but apparently we were good friends for, like, three months. At some point, her family moved to the United Kingdom, but then moved back to [redacted], where I lived, fairly close to my house. So my family was hosting a brunch for her family.
“Everyone, get ready to go to Kaiser,” my dad said that morning. What had happened, apparently, was that while my mom was preparing a frittata*, she cut her finger, and–while it wasn’t major–we needed to go to the hospital.
The brunch was cancelled. Actually, it was held for a different family, the Wolosins, good friends with my family. During the replacement brunch, I made some jokes (probably in bad taste) about how the salvaged frittata contained blood, which it, of course, didn’t. I recorded the incident in my diary with the quote “Everyone, get ready to go to Kaiser.” **
SATURDAY, MARCH 24, 2018. A replacement brunch was held the following Saturday, to very little avail. The two things I remember about it are (1) that Zahara basically only talked when asked direct questions, and (2) that her brother started some sort of ad hoc business selling food to other students on the way to school, or something.
THE FOLLOWING YEARS. But I wanted to hammer that blood frittata joke home. Every time this brunch was mentioned in the future, I would always refer to it as The Blood Frittata Incident, in the hopes that it would eventually catch on as a title. Maybe someone would even misremember a frittata coated in blood. The name’s caught on, but the lies haven’t. Oh well, there’s always the future.
*Her traditional brunch food. My dad makes waffles.
**So, I capitalize in my diary, but this started a bizarre trend of pretending quotes are normal sentences. It’s super beside the point.
(to be continued)
Addendum
Zahara approved the publication of that anecdote; she requested an asterisk about how I later discovered she was amazing. As it happens, I later discovered she was amazing*
If you are particularly entertained by what you’ve read so far, you know me personally, and you want to read the un-redacted version, let me know. There are actually two more sections, “she only kissed the men she killed” and “helios times,” but I decided to end this excerpt with the Blood Frittata Incident.
*ly vain like me in this post which is so thematic of her. Truly a friend of the blog!
Teaser for Tomorrow
It's what you've all been waiting for: the elephant.
Comments