Some weeks ago on the subway 3 tween-aged girls sat next to me. One girl was beside me. One girl was sitting on the third girl’s lap in two seats perpendicular to the ones I was in only because she had spotted what she deemed “the largest pube she’d ever seen” on one of the seats and had refused to sit in it.
I watched in fascination as the horrified girl whipped out her phone to capture and memorialize the moment. Clearly this is the kind of thing one wants to remember. After a stop or two, the girl on the bottom pushed the other one off and moved to the other seat right on top of the large pube! The first girl squealed in disgust as the other one sat down on the seat while mumbling it wasn’t really a pube and to get over it. Within seconds the incident was forgotten, except that it had already been captured with a photo and maybe even a posting. I can’t help but think this girl’s immediate reaction to memorialize something gross gives the errant hair greater importance than it deserves.
As a regular public transit user even I get grossed out by something once in a while. However, I can’t recall a single time when I wanted to document it, especially if it was something really ordinary like hair, gum, or a spilled drink. Most of the time I’m trying to forget the annoying, disgusting, and sometimes traumatic things that happen to me (and others) on public transit. I certainly don’t want to retain images of gross subway things, even if they did cause a moment of hilarity, laughter, or discussion with somebody else.
When we look back at our lives, and even the way we form our memories, I keep thinking about how easy it is to record things digitally. In some ways, I think that gives us a distorted sense of what was really important. Sometimes when I’m really enjoying myself, I’m too caught up in the moment to think about capturing it. Maybe there are times where we take a picture of something thinking that it will be the most important, most life-changing thing EVER and we will always want to remember it. Then in reality it turns out to be a harmless piece of hair on a seat, instantly forgotten the minute somebody sits on it.
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