Director's Notes: 197 - The Life of Frank Chen (Patreon)

The last time I wrote a director’s note for you all, it was before my daughter was born. Now she is four months old, and she smiles when she sees me enter the room and yesterday she tried her first food (acorn squash grown by a nice lesbian couple at the farm down the road). We become people so quickly.

Here she is dressed up for Halloween:

The story of Frank Chen has been a story about life and how we live it. I have always been fascinated by the tiny details of people's lives. Each person is a universe, and we cannot see any other person’s internal universe, not really. 

Our lives are shaped by the big things: genetics, traumas, privilege. But also by so many tiny choices and coincidences that it can be dizzying to try to hold it in your head: did you decide to go to the grocery store that day or not? Did you say hi to that guy at the party or not? Did you go to bed at 11 or at 11:15? Sometimes the choices that shape our lives the most are the ones that seem least important when we make them. It is only in retrospect that we can see every possibility funneling down into this one life we get to live.

Frank Chen only got the one life, and it was a pretty good one. It wasn’t extraordinary, but that’s probably for the best. An extraordinary life can be exhausting and terrible to live. He just lived a pleasant life, diverting in its own way, and that is more than enough.

We have explored all of the other ways it could have gone, in tangents as widely ranged as New Zealand and the prehistoric era. But that isn't what happened. Once our past is set in stone, all of those lost possibilities settle down around us as regret and nostalgia. If you’ve met someone who seems caught up in nostalgia, perhaps it is because they cannot wade out of that ocean of lost possibilities to the solid land of their present day lives.

My daughter hasn’t gotten to any of that yet. She doesn’t have nostalgia nor regret. Every possibility is still in front of her, waiting for her to narrow them down to the one life she will lead.

Here’s a picture of her trying her first real food:

As for What Next in Night Vale? Well, we never know What Next do we? Except that December 15th is our 200th episode (!) and June of 2022 will be Night Vale’s 10th anniversary (!?!!).

Also there seems to be something up with Susan Willman, doesn’t there? I wonder if that will turn into anything.

-Joseph Fink