Figured it was time to update you, my precious little blog. So here's what's happened to me over the past week:
- Went to West Monroe and shot more footage of my grandmother
- Hung out with my awesome cousin and his awesome girlfriend, and saw Star Trek for the second time
- Traced my genealogy back to the 1500's
- Searched (fruitlessly) for my grandmother's adopted sister's grandchildren on Facebook (cause I'm creepy like that)
- Started a new diet and lost 2 lbs.
- Began editing the footage from Mama Ne's wedding as well as the first interview with her
From what I can tell, the narrative that I hope to achieve won't be visible until we're nearly through with filming. Obviously, the frame is my grandmother's life, but I want there to be another narrative thread (a more prominent one, actually) or at least a theme that ties it all together and makes it interesting to watch. Of course, her accounts of stories from her childhood/life before I was born are interesting to me, but I doubt they will interest many other people outside of my family (and even my family, from what I can tell, is not nearly as interested as I am in what her prom dress looked like, what songs were played at her first wedding, how she wore her hair in 1963, things like that).
Which leads us back to the overwhelming theme or story that I want to tell. I want there to be exposition, conflict, and resolution. Just not sure how to show those things. I'm better with writing; images and other people's words are a very new medium for me to manipulate.
Mama Ne mentioned in our first interview that a book of genealogy was written on her father's family. My dad just so happened to have a copy of the book, which I examined yesterday afternoon during my down time at work. That sort of thing is very interesting to me, because really, I'm an old lady at heart. I used genealogy.com's free family tree maker to create a pretty thorough family tree, if I do say so myself, dating all the way back to Thomas and Iwerner Bowers, my oldest relatives traced in the book my dad let me borrow.
Then, as I mentioned in my sexy bulleted list, I used the information from that book to search Facebook for my younger cousins whom I've never met, because their grandmother (Mama Ne's younger sister) was adopted. Not much luck. Thanks to the relative commonness of their names and Facebook's impeccable privacy settings, I wasn't able to find many promising leads. It was exciting to know the names of this family that I've never met, people who most likely don't know I exist, but it was equally disappointing to find that I really have no way of contacting them, and even if I did, they probably wouldn't care to know me.
As for the diet, I am HUNGRY. But it's not so bad. All the fruit and veggies my little tummy can handle. Additionally, it's one of those you-buy-our-food deals, and you're suppost to eat two of the prepackaged meals each day. I've only found one that I like, so we're going to need to order some more of that (Chicken Pasta Parmasean) asap, because we're already out and I've essentially only eaten fruit + liquid the past 2 days. Ah yes, the liquids! The diet also includes at least 2 shakes a day, blended from either a vanilla or chocolate mix. The shakes are pretty delicious, but sadly we're out of the vanilla blend, which is best for fruity shakes.
The only problem with this diet that we've noticed so far is that it's EXPENSIVE. Fruit and veggies (even canned and frozen ones) suck up $$ quickly when you're eating at least 5 servings a day, plus adding them in shakes. This is one of those times when I really wish I was a homeowner and could have a little pea patch of my own. Or better yet, a gazillionaire, and a pineapple plantation of my own.
Even though I have more to talk about, I get the feeling this blog post has gone on long enough. If you've made it all the way down here to the bottom without having an attack of ADD, congratulations! If I had prize-awarding capabilities, you would win something.
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