Memories that fade like photographs

So I talked to my mom today, and apparently the hard drive on the family's computer crashed. Everything is gone...pictures from the last six or seven years, my sisters' music, any essays or other school assingments in progress...everything. The thing that my mom and my next oldest sister are freaking out the most about are the pictures. Isn't it strange how years ago, when pictures cost money to take and develop, we took fewer and they seemed less vital? But now in the digital age, we take pictures of everything. Every laugh, every memory, every moment documented forever in bits and bytes in a computer's memory. And they're all so essential.

I think it's because the invention of the digital camera has given us such a micro view of our lives. It used to be that pictures told a thousand words, they told stories. Now they tell moments, but their value isn't diminished for that. If anything, it's intensified. The pictures I have--particularly the candid ones--describe how the subject felt in that moment. There's an elusiveness to them that you can't keep in memory alone. There is one photo I have in particular that always illustrates this for me. It's a picture from my senior year, when several of my friends and I decided to have a giant mudfight. We wanted to destroy the practice field after our final practice of the season. That was a year of last hurrahs, and the mudfight is defintely atop the list of Moments. It's not candid, but it caputres the essence of the moment so perfectly. The guys are flexing and being goofy, the girls are all throwing up fake gang signs, and even though everyone's face and clothes are covered in mud, the grins on our faces shine through and the exhilaration is apparent. It's like the signature quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower: "And in that moment, I swear we were infinite." That's exactly what that picture depicts.

And that's not the only picture I have that so vividly describes a moment. It's just the first one that always comes to mind. I'd be devestated if I lost all of those. I'm going to Best Buy this weekend to buy an external hard drive. I can't imagine losing all those moments.

So to help my sister and my mom, I decided to go through all my pictures and make copies of ones that they might want. I'm making copies of anything with my family in it. The problem is...well, that narcisism blog that I posted a few weeks back? Well here it comes again. I have so few pictures of my family. Easily, 90% of my pictures are of me and my friends, or me and people that used to be friends but I don't talk to anymore, or me and people that used to be my friends who I actively hate now. Isn't that sad? I probably have just as many pictures of people that I dislike, as I do of my family. I don't hate my family by any means...pictures were just always my mom's responsibility. I was the one being photographed. And how egotistic is it that I took SO MANY pictures of people that were only important to me for the time? It's driving me crazy. I really need to learn to prioritize.