Yannick Trapman-O'Brien
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July Archive Highlight - “Saying 'this is important, because it's in this time capsule' "
🕑 Added 2024-08-01 20:21:38 +0000 UTC
It’s the final waning hours of July - or at least, it was last night when I was sitting in the Wifi-less desert of Amtrak’s 30th Street Station, babysitting the installation of some new vinyls*. And so after emerging from the kind of sleep that follows an 8pm-5am shift, let's agree that I'll thank you profusely for your patience if you agree not to mention the bags under my eyes. Deal?
~
Back in April, I shared some of the ways I was rethinking and re-engaging with my 10-year-and-counting time-capsule project, from this May Fourth (working title). Aside from refreshing the questions, I’ve been thinking a lot about my interview from 2023, in which the interviewer challenged me on why I hadn’t been listening to any of the past recordings. (I believe the phrase “that’s just dumb” made a few appearances; treasure the friends who call it like they see it). And since July was my birthday month, I thought it was a good occasion to take a peek at a past year and see what I noticed.
In May of the year 2015, I was one year out of college, 11 months into living in New York City for the 3rd time in my ilife), and 8 months into trying and failing to stop living in New York City. I had spent the previous Fall working 3 contracts at once and building actual Savings for the first time in my life, and had spent the Winter feeling increasingly stuck.
Vincent 5:24
How are you?
Yannick 5:27
I'm okay. I think this like off period between jobs has kind of dropped me down. Money's in theory coming in this month, which means I'll make Rent and all those things—I'm fine. I have a lot of money in a bank. I don't know why I'm pretending I don't. But I have anxiety about it. Because I'm like this is I have this overwhelming sense that this is the only time in my life that I'll have money, or at least for the next like 10 years. And I'm like, so "I got to make this last 10 years" or more accurately, I've just got to spend it. Well. It's got to turn into like a sequence of cool things. And,— but I kind of, I tell myself that I live like I make much less. So I feel like I'm bracing for the fall. And we shall see.
But I'm well. I'm —someone asked me what I was doing. I was like,” basically sitting in a park all day.” That was my end of April.
It’s a pretty old trope now that listening to the sound of one’s own voice is uncomfortable, but if you have to do it, I recommend proofreading a transcript of your conversation; it keeps the mind just occupied enough to not shudder (or at least, not shudder constantly). More meaningfully, I think when I keep my attention on the small and almost menial details of the conversation (did I say “I should have?” or “I should’ve?”), it helps me postpone reaching conclusions. Instead, things pop out - things I forgot saying or thinking, details of my life at the time that seemed more prominent then than in hindsight, and vice versa. Overall, I found myself with two takeaways:
The stories I tell last a long time
Listening to the interview and reading the transcript, I was struck by how many things I was already saying in the year 2015 that I rarely make it through a month without repeating: I quote an interview (which I had conducted that year) where the speaker articulated something I still find essential about humans finding purpose in creating things and being conditioned to think consuming will give us the same satisfaction; there’s a rant about the rituals of weddings that I still reliably deliver as if someone had pulled the string on my back; I talk about my sister in the same anecdotes that I used in 2015—even the same phrases, and words. It’s one thing to read one’s writing and recognize it, but the funny thing about recorded audio is thinking about your spoken language as having consistent style, vocabulary and tendencies.
Back when I was studying to be an actor, I was often told Character study should start by writing down everything the character says, and everything that’s said about them. So what does it say about me if so many of the things I say are the same after 9 years?
Speaking of actors…
Letting go of a story takes a long time
Vincent:
What is something that you've never told anyone?
Yannick 29:41
Hmm. That's a very good question. This —there's a couple things that come to mind. And I want to say this is the lamest, but I also don't. I sometimes —and sometimes is often— wonder if I'm going to end up being an actor. Which is such a small confession. But it's so large because, for— for a long time in my life now, the kind of constant was like, "well, that's it." And there's this terror that that will be like the first and greatest failure of my life. Is when I finally have to accept like, "maybe you're just not really that capable at this. [...] That's such a small confession of—it's not I mean, it's like a baseline, radioactive level of anxiety in my life that I wonder like, "what if?”
This section was surprising to me listening back from the future, knowing that the ambivalence about the role of “Actor” is something I would spend the next 5 or 6 years wrestling with. To my ear, it seems like as I go on speaking, I already knew so much that I thought of myself at the time as being uncertain about.
Now, that kind of professional identity is something much more amorphous for me. Often I have the luxury of not needing to define it - a benefit of self-producing solo-theater promoted solely by word of mouth is you don’t need to explain yourself too often. And even in those instances in which I do have to communicate what I do,, I can lean on my ongoing projects to serve as examples, and am frequently able to get away with just inviting people to my work so they can define it for themselves. There’s some avoidance there, but also opportunity for fluidity and freedom: these days I think a lot about what I make, but rarely about what it makes me.
~
As a coda, I stumbled across a very meta part of the conversation that it seemed apt to include:
Vincent
What is something? If you were given the chance to put one thing in a time capsule? What is the one thing you will put in a time capsule?
Yannick 41:59
When's it gonna be open?
Vincent
You don't know
Yannick
Is the time capsule for me? Or is it?
Vincent:
No.
Yannick:
Interesting. So this is some Voyager shit. The third person that came into my mind was a piece I wrote in 2012, three days before the end of the world in anticipation of the world ending. Because I feel like A) because I secretly believe it was well done.
Vincent:
(chuckles)
Yannick:
B) because I feel like it captured a lot of my thoughts and my sensibilities and my sense of humor. And, you know, it felt it felt like me— to a degree—//
Vincent:
Okay//
Yannick:
—enough. Um, but that feels— in this day and age, the idea of storing writing in a time capsule seems so strange, because like it's on my computer. And it's been posted online, so it exists forever. But the insane thing about all this data is that
Vincent: 42:55
//putting it in a frame. Saying "this is important, because it's in this time capsule,"//
Yannick 42:59
//well, not just that, but because, uh— there's a lot of shit on my computer that I'll never see it again. You know, people have their iPhones and they take a million photos they'll never look at again. And they "we don't have to because it's there." But is it there anymore? You know, it's so barely existent. It's this like, thin, sickly, shade of an existence— you know these Greek ideas of shades? Which are these like ghosts? And like, that's all you are? Is you're the shadow of a person. And it's like the shadow of being is to be in anticipation of perhaps one day being needed. Yeah, let's say that I can't think of anything else. Another thought I had was like, my beloved pants that I don't think I'll be able to patch that are so like, dear to me.
Unknown Speaker 43:44
I thought you might say these recordings?
Yannick:
No, not these.
In a way, this project puts me in a curious position of being able to look back in a very specific way. But in a larger sense, most of us these days are carrying around oceans of ephemera from our recent— and not-so-recent pasts. My University lets alumni keep their email addresses, but this year they announced that on August 1st that they’d limit everyone’s storage. This kicked off a frantic dash from students to copy or otherwise save the Gigabytes of Digital Stuff they’d been socking away for a decade. One friend reported her alarm and dismay at finding draft emails from her time in college and realizing how she perceives that person now.
I’m curious if there’s a thoughtful way or format I could build to activate those archives for audiences. But for now, I’ll just keep digging up my time capsules.
~
