Editor’s Pick: A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self, 20th Anniversary Edition

I’m not sure if I’d want to have a conversation with myself at the age of 12 because I think I’d find a pretty obnoxious, slightly spastic energy ball that I’d keep telling to shut up. Then again, there is the novelty of a kid having some peculiar foresight to tape a Q&A with his older self, just in case technology might be able to create a dialogue between the two selves.

Jeremiah McDonald’s trip manage to nail the shock and sense of bizarre in seeing oneself, but it also makes you wonder what it would be like to converse with the smaller, bigger-headed, big-mouthed version of yourself, and the kind of questions you’d have to answer after big technology leaps and your own behavioral changes, once adulthood, money concerns, divorce, mortgages, and / or psychotic girlfriends entered your life.

There are 3-5 known film fragments of myself – about the same for my parents – because we had no video or film cameras – but the small main sliver I have of myself, 10 years old with family at Niagara Falls, indicates I was borderline nuts.

It’s really puzzling to see extreme mutant facial distortion and weird & lumpy walking, and it’s probably good the Super 8 film is silent, because even from watching me ‘talk’ I know I’m not saying anything wise. In fact, I’m sure what’s pouring out is that whiny, dynamically extreme gibberish typical of small big-headed kids.

McDonald’s short is clever, fun, and captures the surreal quality of processing the novelty and horror of seeing yourself at a strange maturity level – presuming, of course, you’re miles ahead today, all sophisticated, learned, and suave.

Yeah…

 

Mark R. Hasan, Editor

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