Lara Reyes-Terry | Week 16 | Needing Storage
The word you’re looking for is pathetic.
It’s pathetic to be up at god knows what hour, slid halfway down your pillow, frustration stuffing your mouth with silence because walking into darkness for food isn’t a possibility anymore. You’re not frustrated about being hungry—your face is an ugly mess, the result of pulling that loose thread on your pants too tightly. The light of your phone is so bright it makes everything within a five inch radius all the darker. You can’t stop thinking about the clothes you set out for the next morning because if you don’t, you’ll start to convince yourself that the guy standing in the corner of your room is real. You’re just trying to doomscroll is all.
Between the vigorous workout of your thumbs swiping up up up up a hundred miles to nowhere and the thirty-eight course meal of color your eyes gorge one, you’re still tired and still hungry. For taking so much space on your phone, it takes too little in your mind.
(11:11 They’re going to realize…)
It’s cold here.
(Sorry but he never would…)
Realize what?
(Update your Sunday dinner…)
Would?
(We cannot forget what they’ve done…)
I hate ads.
By the time your finger hits the glass again, the last thing you saw leaves phone and mind, you can barely keep pace. It could be good, at least the extra stuff gets garbaged immediately, you might cry if you didn’t leave enough room upstairs for your exams. You also forgot what you weren’t supposed to forget though. Pity.
Instagram can’t take that much space on your phone right?
That’s what you remember? Not the conspiracy theories, overseas war, or charity calls? You’re still tired so you skip that rabbit hole for the current one you’re crawling down.
You swipe over to your settings.
The red numbers on its corner bugs you every time you see it but you’re still not gonna pay for extra services Apple. You scroll down a little bit (you forget where storage is), you’re tempted to go back to the more stimulating version. Never mind, you found it before you could forget what you were doing this time.
And jeez, why are your photos taking up so much space!
You make the perilous journey to the leftmost home screen page because Instagram is kept isolated in the rightmost interface. It comes back to you that you put it there to keep you away from it, not to bring your attention to the glowing eye beckoning you to stay a few minutes. Or hours. Or days.
Your emails, your journal entries, your notes, your messages. Those and a few more arranged together and it comes back to you that this was meant for productivity.
But finally, you open your photos and start drafting them one by one for a first class ride to the trash—no detours, layovers, or distractions (hah).
You delete the old photos of your homework because you’ve already submitted them and got the grade you wanted after panicking for the week you went without points because you were teetering on failure. You delete the references you took and never used because the painting’s already finished. You delete the different angles you took of the squirrels you befriended because it’s not that deep that you won’t ever see those sides of them again.
You delete the screenshots of your favorite items because you could never forget pieces of yourself.
You delete the bad selfies. There are some things you want to forget.
You check your storage again and why the hell is there still so much junk in it? Review your photos and videos, you and your phone think in unison.
You delete all but two of the twelve photos you took of the sunset because there will be another when you remember to look up again. You delete the photos of once-friends because even though you still talk with them, the simple crime of drifting is enough to lose stake in your storage. You delete family photos because out of the twenty other people in them, there has to be someone who cares enough to keep everything. You delete the photos of that person because why do you even have evidence of your adoration, you won’t be caught dead with their face in your hands (figuratively and literally).
You delete until you’re bored. You don’t check your storage space again because the value doesn’t matter anymore.
You go back to doomscrolling.
Your storage space is so clear. What are you gonna put there now?
~~~
Here’s hoping for a good final blog!
Image: https://drfone.wondershare.com/iphone-problems/iphone-16-black-screen.html
Lara, as always, your blog has left me intrigued. I love the topics you choose in this blog.
ReplyDeleteI strongly agree that the “up up up up” is reducing the quality of life. I think phones in general are extremely overrated. While they are super, super useful and I probably could not live without mine, I love to think about how amazing some aspects of life would be if these devices did not exist. For example, I think the social part of school—like humans talking to humans—has decreased immensely post COVID, post everyone obtaining cellular devices. It honestly makes me sad, and, in a way, disappointed because I feel like my favorite thing about school is the social aspect, and phones take away from it.
I think the only way to describe your line about the “last thing you saw leaves phone and mind” is true. It is crazy how we have wired ourselves into this short term consumption. The other day, I was reading an article about how our generation has stepped away from long-term consumption of content. For example, even when we watch movies, we find ourselves scrolling through our phones.
I think the idea of photos taking up storage is super interesting. It feels insane because at least for me, I never go back and look at photos, but it hurts to delete them SO MUCH. It’s like I’m deleting memories, memories that I once held precious and dear. Your highlight that someone else will save them (the photos) is honestly so relatable because that is exactly what I feel when I delete photos.
Overall, I loved reading your blog/ blogs this semester. I loved your creative style and how different they were. Do not change your originality; it was fresh and enjoyabl
Lara, it has been a pleasure reading and connecting with each one of your blogs. This, like many of the others, has left me feeling seen as a teenager. I’ve noticed your artistic interests shine brightly through your writing and I hope you never lose that.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading your blog for this week I found the parallel between being “hungry” and “doomscrolling” to be very relatable. As it has been proven many times, short-term content gives us a dopamine kick that quickly causes us to become reliant on our devices. Overtime social media turns into this drug that just does not feel the same anymore, which I thought you encapsulated pretty well with your dialogue in the middle.
Funnily enough, there was a video I watched on one of these platforms that asked me, “Do you know what video two scrolls behind this one was about?” Although this video was an ad for some AI tool, the question really stuck with me as I started to realize my attention span was slowly deteriorating.
At the end of your blog you asked, what I find to be, a very important question. “What are [we] going to put there now?” I hope this summer we spend more time away from our phones and towards actual hobbies and interests. By doing so, I think we’ll be surprised with what we are capable of.
Lara, your blogs keep punching arrows into me! I don’t know how you do it, but it seems like every week this semester, you’ve written something that really strongly resonates with something I’m guilty about… or perhaps, what we’re both guilty of…
ReplyDeleteProbably everyone has heard of the rhetoric regarding doomscrolling. “We all do it.” “Dopamine keeps you locked in place.” It’s well used, and yet, either way, no words of the wind can separate the thumb from the next swipe up. So I’m glad you’ve spun your own way of describing it all. I’ve always liked the way you write! It feels like all of your writing are carefully tuned narratives; the True Story you presented displayed your skills beautifully! I appreciate how you’ve incorporated the concept of memory into this, since I am finding that my forgetfulness has engulfed much of my life since losing myself to the War on Scrolling post AP exams. This thing of the storage upstairs and darting between what stimulates the mind, while interacting with a million things after another, showcase the journey through our phones very effectively.
Thank you for this blog! Your hopes definitely came through, because reading this final one was another experience that I’ll definitely remember for a while. I feel blessed to have been with you all year, reading your super splendid writing. Love your creativity with everything. Please keep being mega awesome!