Let A Thousand Confetti Flowers Bloom
I took a photo. With a camera. I wasn’t thinking thousands or possibly millions of strangers might some day see it and share it for years to come. A journey to Old Internet Town.
It was 15 years ago. I was in a Kmart in New Jersey. I honestly don’t know why I was there, but in the toy aisle there was a lavender box with colorful bubble letters shouting “LEARN TO BE A JOURNALIST”. The box’s contents included all the required tools of the profession: glitter gel pens and gemstones and confetti flowers and sequins and glue and denim and an idea booklet. Since I am a journalist and at the time I was working at The New York Times, I naturally found this box with its big Elle Woods energy and fanciful list of ingredients wonderfully ridiculous. The Times may be the most storied news organizations in the world, with its 130 Pulitzers and hundreds of top-notch reporters and editors all over the world, but there is nary a confetti flower or glitter pen to be found in that newsroom. (At least there wasn’t in 2005.)
Anyway ... I did what I do all the time, I took a photo and shared it with friends. Except, this was 15 years ago. I didn’t have an iPhone—they weren’t even released to the public until 2007. I had a trusty Canon PowerShot S50 that I took pretty much everywhere with me, (along with my Palm Pilot Treo and my new iPod Nano and a large bag to lug it all around.)
I took the photo. I went home. I downloaded it to my laptop. I attached the photo to an email and sent the email to a handful of friends that I thought would also find this amusing. I might have used AIM to share it with a few others.
A few days later, my friend David Gallagher posted the image to his Flickr account. Flickr, for those who may not know, was a popular image hosting site in the olden days of the internet. Right after cave drawings there is Flickr.
The comments, presumably from other journalists, were delightful. “Excellent. A lockable journal is essential for writing down the names of all your super ultra secret sources. Especially when they're really your imaginary friends.” …. “Personally, I require multiple colors of glitter pen to get the story details right.”
I shared the photo with few people at work hoping everyone would find this as hilarious as I did. (How did I share? I physically walked over to them and showed the photo on my camera like the cavewoman I am, probably. I don’t know. Most people thought it was silly and fun.)
But eventually I must have been talking or laughing too loudly because one of my colleagues felt compelled to burst into this bubble of mirth and explain my photo to me in a scoldy tone: “Actually, they are not talking about news journalists, Lisa. It is a toy. They mean journalists as in one who makes a journal. Like a diary.”
I deflated like a glitter-covered balloon. All the fun and whimsy I was feeling immediately was sucked out of me and I slunked back to my desk as quietly as possible. The photo was still saved as my desktop image for a bit, but then I kind of forgot about it. Moved on to new jobs. My Flickr account was neglected in favor of shiny new platforms where I could post funny signs or my dogs’ furry faces. My Powershot eventually was abandoned as I got an iPhone.
Then, one day it reappeared: my photo. It was about 10 years later and seeing it suddenly breeze by on Twitter was like hearing a wisp of an old, forgotten pop song blasting from the radio of a car speeding by.
“Learn to be a journalist. Glitter essential,” tweeted Lynnette Peck, a TV producer in the UK, and a total stranger.
A portal to the past briefly cracked open, reminding me of a time when the internet felt more hopeful and innocent and—dare I say it?—fun. I saw comments about gel pens and capitalizing the G in Glitter Glue and laughed. And then this amusement became curiosity, and I felt a little like Homer Simpson when he found the Mr Sparkle box in the town dump. In disbelief, I went back to Flickr a few times to double check that the crop of the photo tweeted was the same as the one posted. I did reverse-image searches. I wondered how this random relic from my past had found its way to a stranger’s Twitter account.
The best I can figure out is David Gallagher is the outbreak monkey for this bit of virality. In my memory, David’s Flickr was pretty popular. Especially compared to my tiny account. Over the years, people have looked at my photo 12,651 times from his account versus 14 from mine. Strangers apparently liked the joke and copied the photo and shared it via different methods and it wound its way around to Facebook and a few blog posts —once alongside something about Infowars — and eventually to Twitter and back to me. A few times a year the photo starts appearing again.
It's the only thing I’ve ever done that seems to have gone super viral, and I did it before going super viral was even really a thing. I took a photo. With a camera. I wasn’t thinking thousands or possibly millions of strangers might some day see it. I was thinking this is silly fun and a few friends and family members might think so, too. There was no expected rush of dopamine or checking and rechecking an app to see if it was a hit. There was really no anxiety involved.
I was so innocent then. We all kind of were.
But now, as I type this very piece I am imagining being scolded by tons of Actually People, messaging to remind me the world was actually bad in 2005, and my colleague was right about the journaling versus journalist-ing thing, and a mess of other remarks about why I would write something this frivolous when there are so many More Important Things I should be thinking about.
Yes, I know I am not the first person who is telling you this, but just to confirm any suspicions: The internet has only gotten worse in the 15 years since that trip to Kmart. We talk about it being cursed. It is the thing forever gobbling up your personal information and helping destabilize democracies and spreading disinformation. Oh, and don’t get me started on the Nazis.
Despite promises to myself not look at Twitter in the morning, every day I wake up and peek in. Within minutes my anxiety creeps upward as I scroll through the devastatingly grim news: More Americans sick and dying from Covid infections, more ridiculous fights about things that don’t really exist, more jobs lost, more children going hungry, more police violence going unpunished, more, more, more, always horrible more-ness. I haven’t even finished my first cup of coffee, and people are debating the death of Democracy and I am thinking maybe I should go back to bed right away ... and HOLY SHIT WHAT DID THE PRESIDENT SAY NOW?!
But sometimes, when I am in the midst of this meltdown, my photo returns to me via another stranger.
Most recently it arrived via Sara Just, executive producer of PBS NewsHour, who, like me long ago in a New Jersey Kmart, discovered the Easter-egg-colored box with it’s absurd promise that a few confetti flowers and some glitter can make you a journalist, and decided to share it with some friends.
“I am completely out of glitter glue and confetti flowers,” she wrote.
“Need the idea booklet” replied Ann Marie Lipinski, of the Nieman Foundation.
I’m not sure exactly where Just first saw the image. (Sara Just, if you are reading this, message me back! I am a fairly harmless weirdo!) Maybe I don’t have to know. (I really want to know, though, Sara!) Maybe I should just try to enjoy something that happens very rarely in 2020: A tweet was soothing. I got the warm rush of hearing the old pop song kick in. I took a deep breath. And I put down my phone.
For a few minutes, anyway.
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