http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/10853

Creatively Speaking: Isobella Jade’s memoir
by David – January 2, 2008 – 3:02 AM

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It’s a new year, so I thought I’d start by introducing a new feature I’m calling Creatively Speaking, in which I interview all sorts of artists for a first-hand look at how they go about creating their work.

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Humorously, NEW YEAR’S DAY, I wrote the following comment.

http://www.jibberjobber.com/blog/archives/1060#comments

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Hey, you have to have a certain amount of ego to take the bruises of everyday life. After layoffs, and all the other bad things that happen to good people every lifetime, you have to have the self-confidence to say “I wrote THE book” on something. Even if it’s one’s own autobiography, everyone has a story to tell.

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And the very next day, the UNIVERSE delivers some reinforcement!

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DI: When you were writing the book at Apple, how did you save your files?

IJ: I saved the files each day to my Yahoo account, email form. I still have most of them saved. The Apple store did bring some tragic moments though while writing the book…I did have a moment when the Internet froze on the iMac I was working on while writing. Which meant I couldn’t save my document to my email and I thought about saving it to a folder on the desktop or making one somewhere discreet so no one would take it. After I pouted to a store employee about my catastrophe he told me I could buy a CD at the store and then download it, but my funds were limited at the time. So instead I called a film director I knew who lived in SoHo and even with a broken leg, in his crutches he brought me a CD and I was able to burn my document on the disk and save one of the best parts of my book. I believe once you write something, you can never fully write it again the same, so I wasn’t going to leave the store without it. And yes I did cry, stomp my foot, and swear a few times over it. It was extremely dramatic at the time because I also realized at that moment how much the store meant to me, what I was doing, and that even if the store didn’t know it, the store was my means to survival sort of, and it was like I saw my desperation on the computer screen waiting for the Internet to be turned on.

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If you don’t believe that your story is worth telling then who will think it so. (Other than me of course!)

I wish that all my relatives took the time to memorialize their wisdom. Even if they were dead wrong (i.e., “the world is flat”), it serves as a jumping off point from whence you came. As they say “past is prologue” and “those, who don’t learn from history, are doomed to repeat it”.

We have in the internet and endless archive of all human thought that gets recorded. True, much of it (i.e., inet porn) is imho a waste of electrons. But who knows what a genetic researcher can glean from all those photos? I’m not about to throw anything away. Especially when its so cheap to keep. (Consult the Inet Archive guy Brewster Kahle on how it’s possible to archive all human knowledge.) Maybe they will need to know what humans looked like in the Year 2000 some time in the Year 4000 after all the genetic engineering makes humans all look alike.

My point was: everyone’s story is invaluable to understanding the human experience.

And, imho, to leave this existence, without recording it in some form, is a selfish act with tragic consequences.

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