Journal Session with Low Vitamin D: In Which the Generally Stoic Narrator Is Harassed by Footnotes
Editor’s Note: The author wanted to include the following instruction to readers: “Make sure they go through the entire piece first, then go back a second time for the footnotes.“ This piece was received via email a little past midnight Cambodia time referring to events that took place on 1/12/2025 in Upstate New York.
Daniel LaPointe
Did not take the Vitamin D supplement today or the multivitamin. Though I did go for a two-mile walk outside earlier, this was rather close to sunset. Given that it’s the dead of winter and given that I haven’t eaten any foods containing Vitamin D recently (to my knowledge), I’m likely pretty damn low in the stuff right now. Some observations:
- When looking at my phone’s lock screen photo1, I immediately began to think of the depicted mountain range as a 3D object, if that makes sense. That is, I immediately intuited that the image was facing south and that the mountain on the left side of the image depicted the east-most part of the range. My brain (God I hate using that phrase, but it feels appropriate here) then superimposed over the mountains the trail that I followed when hiking them. At various points of interest along the trail – these visible in the image – I involuntarily recalled what the views were like from those points. There was something immensely satisfying about this all playing out so efficiently – in the span of less than a second. Though I’ve long had difficulty locating the right permutation of words to communicate this sensation, the Random Walks essay gets at it with: “I just want to… imagine where I am in relation to everything else.”
- To be clear, this doesn’t usually happen. Generally, the lock screen photo is thought of more for what is represents; rather than being a specific mountain range with an information-dense, spatially aware encoding, it is a low-information pointer to the concept of “a mountain range” and to all the cultural connotations that go with that.
- I am reminded of that sentence at the end of Random Walks: “The key is to stop viewing objects as referents to non-sensory thoughts.” Now, at the end of that essay I hinted at a return to the subject and an invocation of the hippocampus. As the state being described right now recalls that described in the first half of How Does One Sort a Box of Old Photos?, and as that latter essay makes explicit reference to the hippocampus, I may finally make good on that promise.
- I felt an immense urge about two hours ago to look over the iPhone Calendar app and scroll all the way from my birth to today. This is a thing I will do from time to time, the idea being to free-associate memories as the months and years roll by. In a really good session of this, things I hardly ever think about are involuntarily recalled and I “learn” something about myself.2
- As a general matter, I get the feeling my ability to effectively free-associate these memories has declined over time. Tonight, however, the session went really well. Granted, I didn’t get all the way through my life (and in fact skipped around a bit; I have work tomorrow), I can state that the highly nonverbal “vibes” of the years of my life are alive and well, resting in my brain (shudders, there is it again…) as mountain-range-like, awe-inspiring objects that can be viewed from any one of a very large number of angles.
- So there we have the connection between spatial thinking and the effortless association of personal memories. Given that a part of the brain known as the hippocampus is involved in both of these activities (a fact I picked up in PSY 14 back in the Fall 2020 semester, shout-out to Liz Phelps and Dan Schacter3), I’m inclined to think something about my behavior today diverted blood flow to that region.
- In particular, I felt an immense closeness to the year 2017.4 The memories started flooding in: that eight-night run through all the Harry Potter movies with my brother when on winter break after my first semester, that super cool encyclopedia of prehistoric life I got for Christmas5, those nonstop Facebook games with my high school friends6, the explosion onto the scene of r/PrequelMemes, said subreddit not only being actually funny but being so hilarious I genuinely thought I was going to laugh myself to death at one point while browsing it, the heyday of the Harvard Facebook meme page, some less than stellar things about how that semester went I won’t get into here, that time my Mom and brother came out to Boston to visit me for my birthday, etc.
- You know you’ve entered the mindset of a period when a song from that time just instantly starts playing in your head.7 Tonight, I found the Pokémon Go Theme internally blasting, followed shortly after by “We Got the Power” by Gorillaz. Among people who think r/place was the coolest thing ever and who say things like “The timeline split after that damn gorilla got shot8,” these two songs are very, very zeitgeisty for that period.9
- Well, that’s free association for you. This thing is drowning in footnotes. To round this out,10 I’ll mention the last thing I had been doing prior to starting this write-up.
- Quite naturally, I had taken to reading the “Freshman Year Rambles.”11 These are the most interesting and character-revealing things I wrote back then – “free writes” banged out at 3:00 AM in Lamont meant to “warm up my cognitive machinery” but which in reality served as procrastination apparatuses. Ramble #15, which I’ll drop in its entirety, epitomizes the genre. Enjoy the whining.
- Like the author of that piece,12 I’ve got to get some sleep.
Read this after the footnotes.
Notes
2. Though I do recall having free-associated into existence a memory tonight that made me think “holy crap, I haven’t thought about that in forever,” I cannot, at this moment, recall what that memory was. The little rascal seems to have gotten away, perhaps not to be fished up again for another thirty years.
4. This closeness isn’t too much of a surprise. A few hours ago, simulating for my own amusement how a run-of-the-mill interaction with my mother’s boyfriend this evening could have played out in a more interesting and highly self-aggrandizing way,a I challenged myself to think of as many things that happened in 2017 as I could while talking to myself in the bathroom mirror.b
a. B is her boyfriend, D is me. This is the simulated conversation. In reality he just looked at the Star Wars photoi and thought it was funny.
D: Yeah, this is one of the things I’m taking out of my room and bringing to the apartment. It comes from November 2010 – the third and greatest of the seven Disney trips.
B: Hah, you even remember the year!
D: Yup. If you were to graph the quality of the Disney trips over time you would have – [visually depicts graph, egocentrically failing to account for the fact that B is facing D and that the image needs to be reversed]
B: Wow, Danny. You’re so smart!
D: I’m an historian of the self. You say a year and I can immediately begin rattling off things that happened in that year.
B: Uhhhh, how about 2017?
D: [UNLOADS]
D: Yeah, this is one of the things I’m taking out of my room and bringing to the apartment. It comes from November 2010 – the third and greatest of the seven Disney trips.
B: Hah, you even remember the year!
D: Yup. If you were to graph the quality of the Disney trips over time you would have – [visually depicts graph, egocentrically failing to account for the fact that B is facing D and that the image needs to be reversed]
B: Wow, Danny. You’re so smart!
D: I’m an historian of the self. You say a year and I can immediately begin rattling off things that happened in that year.
B: Uhhhh, how about 2017?
D: [UNLOADS]
5. This sucker is a little lonely. He doesn’t get linked often. Couldn’t help but think of him when the prehistoric life thing came up. He tries his best.a
7. I’m reminded of how a variationa from the last movement of Beethoven’s 30th piano sonata began mysteriously playing in my head when reading The Brothers Karamazov. This was that unspeakably beautiful scene where Alyosha kisses the ground the night of his father’s murder. The reaction I had to this scene, and a comparison of this reaction to how I took in other scenes, is perhaps worth a separate write-up.
a. I have a fond memory of my freshman roommate finding this particular pairing to be very, very funny. Dude was literally doing the ROFL thing when I showed it to him.
b. It’s incredible how reliable the nostalgia process is. Plant a seed – even something as ridiculous as skibidi toilet – and it will inevitably bloom.i
10. Whelp, I’ve made it to 4:00 AM. Though I do work an evening shift, tomorrow is going to be… ugh. I’ll get it on the record that tonight’s behavior is extremely uncharacteristic of how things have gone over the last year or so.
If my general character has changed from what it was in the college days, it’s been a consequence of, well, having to act like an adult.
If my general character has changed from what it was in the college days, it’s been a consequence of, well, having to act like an adult.
