Via 'What Do I Know' Weblog
This Old Video. One of the main reasons why I purchased a new G5 was to finally own a DVD burner. Not just to back up data, but to rid myself of the various VHS tapes I have been hauling around from various college dorms and apartments. Most were taped anywhere from 1985 to 1992, and since ripping the tape gun across the top over ten years ago I haven't watched any of them. I always had a feeling I would someday want them, or that technology would eventually get to a place where I could create a permanent digital copy of their content. And now, fifteen years later, I finally have the setup to do just that.
So with my VCR plugged into an analog / digital converter box and a firewire cable running to my G5, last night I launched iMovie, cracked open a box, and started hunting.
The first video I pulled was taped just a couple of months into my freshman year at college -- nearly 15 years ago. I pressed play, and was confronted with the yelps, laughter, and smiling faces of dorm-mates I haven't spoken to or seen in many years. The music was loud, the jokes were adolescent, the hair long, and everyone -- despite the massive quantities of cheap beer they regularly consumed -- was thin as a rail. And like any gathering where a video camera enters the picture, people either acted like total fools, or attempted to lift themselves above the static by vociferating seemingly profound observations. The fools had the longest shelf-life.
And then the inevitable happened -- somebody turned the unwanted camera lens on me. My hair was incredibly long, and my late-80s glasses (which were perfectly in style at the time) much larger than any frame you could find today. My cinderblock jail cell of a dorm room was crammed with people, with my junky Circuit City stereo blasting a rotating mix of The Cult (Electric was a floor favorite), Cure (Disintegration had just come out), Peter Murphy, Stone Roses, and some bad Led Zeppelin bootleg on cassette somebody brought in. We all seemed to be having a good time -- as good a time a bunch of underage people fresh out of high school with nowhere to go could have -- but the longer I watched, the more uncomfortable I became, and I found myself begging for the camera to just...go...away.
Some love to talk about college and high school as the best times of their life, but not me. I was reminded watching the tape how directionless, ignorant, and apathetic I was during those years. I always tried to find something of interest in the traditional school systems, but never really latched on to anything. Instead I wandered from class to class, made the best grades I was capable of, and did just about whatever I could to squelch the crushing boredom of it all -- even if it meant making a jackass out of myself in front of a camera for an hour or two on a cold Monday night in a 10 foot square concrete block.
I made a DVD of the tape, but I seriously doubt I will ever watch it again. It just doesn't interest me all that much. Sticking to the old mantra of only keeping that which you find beautiful or useful, I'm more than tempted to drop the whole box in a trash bag and be done with it. But like old photographs, I can't cross that line. I'll just have to slog through it all, one tape at a time, and hope to pleasantly surprised. [What Do I Know]
9:10:28 AM 
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