Birthday Prep
While this diary is labeled “Birthday Prep,” most of the conversation focuses on Diane’s childhood memories. The topic of Diane’s potential birthday presents quickly segues to one of her favorite childhood toys, her Teddy Ruxpin. The early onset of social anxiety during Diane’s early childhood years lead her to feel more comfortable playing with the stuffed bear than other children. This is clear both in the way she talks about the toy in this video diary and how she discusses it in therapy. The other, more important memory that Diane discusses is that of almost drowning in her bathtub. This near death experience has, in part, lead to her mild obsession with water. (Please see the bathtub video for an example). We find that Diane’s ability to openly discuss this traumatic event is, once again, a clear indication of our progress.
Birthday Cooking Show Trailer
After recording her birthday cooking show, Diane decided to construct a “diary trailer” to entice her friends to watch the four subsequent vlogs outlining her birthday cooking experience. Diane clearly gains her understanding of what a movie trailer “should be” from Hollywood. The shot choices and voice over tone are heavily influenced by common Hollywood marketing tactics. Diane is a frequent movie and television watcher. She prefers Hollywood’s representation of romance, comedy, action, drama, and even horror to the independent film industry’s depiction of these film categories.
Birthday Cooking Show: Episodes 1-5
The five subsequent vlogs are all from Diane’s birthday cooking show she created based on the recipes given to her by her online friends/diary viewers. Each vlog is dedicated to a different recipe. Overall, this experience appears to have been extremely successful in both keeping Diane’s mind off of her holiday loneliness and further opening her up to her friends and viewers. Unfortunately, the high note set by the making of these blogs was punctuated with an extremely injurious situation. As Diane claims in many of her previous vlogs, Leonard is supposed to join her for her birthday. (See Leonard). Now, as we all know, Leonard is purely a figment of Diane’s imagination. For this reason, we were not sure if Leonard would “show up” or not. As it turned out, he did not. This upset Diane. So much so, that she once again collapsed into an intermittent explosive rage (this is not shown on the video). To our surprise, Diane decided to post these four vlog despite the unfortunate outcome of the evening. We believe that Diane has forgiven Leonard, and they are once again friends.
Episode 1: Cupcakes
Home