"Noted"

Themes on repetition

As much as I hate the current iteration of the Photos app on iOS, I use its in-app functionality to find something nearly every day. Whenever I’m searching for a selfie, a meme, or a picture from a specific era of my life, it’s pretty helpful, but it’s not perfect: dogs show up when I search “cat,” the audio-search option fails to find many videos where there actually is a “Laugh,” and photographs of my handwriting are largely illegible and unsearchable. I’m often much better with words in uniform font, so the Messages app provides a specific refuge.

If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, I’ve probably, at one point, paused for upwards of thirty seconds to mentally forage for the situationally or lexically correct term or idiom. I like to have a diverse vocabulary, but I fear, in my current job, that I am repeating myself all the time: saying the same things in the same order, often paragraphs at a time, to different people, day in, day out. I feared this inclination had bled into my personal life, and, with a few cursory searches, I have been proven right by the device upon which I spend/waste/wile away hours every day.

For example:

I wondered how diverse the texts were that prompted my constant response of “noted” with varying levels of punctuation. What was being noted, exactly, in these texts and the dozens of other instances of my notation? An incomplete list:

• My old roommate wanted a Diet Coke from the deli

• My now-roommate wanted to circumvent a broker’s fee

• My roommate-twice-removed put Drain-O in the sink

• I need to read Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

• My crush has been told he looks good in red

• My crush thought I looked good in glasses

• My friend in whose rental car I left my glasses would be home around ten o’clock

• I should bring “hummus and peppers or carrots or whatever” for our Sex and the City (2008) watch party

• There are “gorgeous af vintage furniture places in greenpoint but they’re all very expensive”

• Dillon “will have a few but BYOP [Bring Your Own Pumpkin] is encouraged”

Already, images formed in my mind: of punctuality, of desires, of boundaries, of obligations, of things that have never occurred and things that have happened many times over. This is neither the only example of a recurrent response nor the most interesting. Paraphrasing an adage from Lao Tzu’s philosophy, our thoughts become words which become actions which become habits which become character which is, of course, the source from which self-respect springs. Through this project, I’m interested in discovering what words, phrases, ideas, and images have become motifs in my subconscious and conscious lives, especially where they repeat, converge, and are reshaped.

I grabbed coffee with Allegra this morning, through whose support I’ve regained the interest and confidence in writing something—anything—for public consumption, beyond my activities on Letterboxd and The App Formerly Known as Twitter. (Fun fact: the last time I texted “noted” to Allegra, on November 28, 2022, it was in confirmation of Jeremy Strong’s favorite table at my old restaurant job.)

I named this publication “Where Life Begins” what feels like a lifetime ago, but it still feels appropriate for this endeavor. A life without words would be a lonely one, in my eyes. There’s a lot to be said for what we say all the time.

xo,

Jarod