What really stuck out to me in this reading was the discussion of disorder, scarcity, and seeming randomness in written timelines. When I first saw the timeline on page 12, I admit I wrote it off as badly written and difficult to follow. When I read the reasoning behind these sparse, disjoint events–a collective reflection of the chaotic and disorderly times–I understood the importance of these annals in addition to the ones that tell more classic narratives. I think that this disorderly, random quality of the world is still present now–maybe just less so than it used to be.

With this thought, I couldn’t help but think of a parallel to movies. Indpendently produced films (often known as Indie films) can usually be distinguished from mainstream movies because their narratives feel raw and unpolished–more realistic. The films are usually comprised of two types of scenes: those meant to move the story along and those meant to give life to the story by depicting random bits of everyday life that are often left out when recounting a story. These films are less enjoyable to people who like narratives to be polished, tweaked, even engineered to create the most compelling or thrilling story–like they often are in mainstream movies. I am not an Indie film fanatic, but I do appreciate them. Thinking of annals as the Indie films of the timeline world made me appreciate them more.