(Drumroll) My 2009 Man of the Year is (surprise) Ryan A. Conklin. However, the selection is not as you might think a subjective choice based on my long-standing admiration for my favorite infantryman. It is instead an objective assessment using a criterion inspired by that which is used by Time magazine in their selection of a Person of the Year. Their criterion is the person who has had most impact on the news during the year. My version is to select the person who had the greatest impact on my time during the year.I calculate conservatively that I've spent at least 600-700 hours on Ryan Conklin fandom in 2009 on writing blog posts alone. Why was it so much? Well, a proficient writer could churn this schlock out in a lot less time, but unfortunately, I'm not a writer. I guess it would take maybe around 4 hours on average per post for me to decide what I want to say, select a screencap, and then do the actual composition. There are 115 posts here, 18 elsewhere, plus another 21 that are translations in German and Spanish (which can take a long time to do to find the right foreign words). Doing the math that adds up. Then add in the 11 Ryan-centric RWB episode recaps and the fan page on two of my other sites, and the numbers get high.
The aforementioned total doesn't include the thought time for what to post on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Vevmo, and YouTube. I don't know how much time that was, but thinking of just the right thing to say that is 140 characters or less can take awhile.
One thing that I think is interesting is the selection of the screencaps. It can be laborious to find the exact video frame that best captures the mood of the post. The other consideration is that I always tried to get a view and a facial expression that made Ryan look his best. Sometimes you have to take a bunch of caps a few tenths of a second apart and compare them to find just the right nuance.
So how did this all get started? It was January 7th, 2009, when episode one of The Real World Brooklyn first aired. I sat there and watched Ryan introduce himself and saw his interactions with the other cast members. I am the kind of person who doesn't just listen to the words people say. I look at how they say it, and what do their eyes, body language, and other nuances say. From what I saw I determined that here was somebody who is very intriguing, and who I believed had a lot of substance to them (certainly in contrast to a lot of other RW cast members through the years).
At least four things stuck out in my mind from just that episode. One was Ryan being a veteran. That status alone was interesting because it was something new, but it was made more so because Ryan didn't fit the stereotype in my mind of what an Army veteran would be like. A second thing that interested me was when Ryan said he could figure anybody out in the first five minutes after meeting them. A guy paying that much attention and making observations of what is going on in the people around him is unusual. The third thing was the display of both lightheartedness and depth of emotion in the songs he sang in the little boat. Then fourth was the whole conversation on the stairs with JD Ordonez about Katelynn Cusanelli. To appreciate it, you had to spend some time analyzing what was really going on there with Ryan. You could tell he wasn't some stock character. He had a personality that it would take some time to adequately understand.
For me it became a little game to see as time went by over the next several months if I could put all the clues together from I saw on the show, from what I read about him, and from viewing the daily clips. After awhile it got kind of frustrating. There would be new pieces of the puzzle that just didn't fit with anything that had come before. Like, "He's also a filmaker??" I likened it to having a 10000 piece jigsaw puzzle for which I didn't have the picture on the box. I was trying to put these pieces together to complete a comprehensive description of the man, but I couldn't see the complete picture.
One of the reasons that Ryan is hard to understand is that he is just complicated. He has said that there are things about himself that he doesn't understand. However, another cause is that he is a person who puts on false fronts for various reasons. In some cases he admits it, like when he left his family at the airport when he returned to active duty. He had decided he would outwardly maintain composure to lessen the burden on his family. In other situations, there would be times that he was trying to fool himself, like when he said when Belle visited that he just wasn't a guy that cried or got emotional. At least by that time, I knew enough about him to know that wasn't believable. Whatever made him not emotional in the relationship wasn't an inability to be so.
A third thing that can make Ryan a challenge to be understood, is that he can act quite contrary to his nature. A case in point is when he acts like what he calls being "a smart ass". I think he can act like he is one, but is not in fact one. I think a smart ass is someone who doesn't care if he hurts someone else, whereas Ryan does care. He acts out that way for two reasons. One is that he can see the humor in insult comedy and he practices it, usually behind the subject's back. However, we can see from examples where Ryan would backtrack if he saw the butt of joke being upset about it. The other situation of Ryan being a smart ass was when he was trying early on to have some kind of involvement with the other cast members. The first day he sat back and was unsure of what he was going to do. Then he started being obnoxious just so he could be engaged with people, like a schoolboy being mean to a girl he liked because he didn't know how else to interact with her. Finally with the famous pole dancing class, Ryan revealed in Confessional that he felt he found his place in the group, being the comedian (and not needing to be the smart ass anymore).
How does Ryan's contentious relationship with Devyn Simone and Sarah Rice fit with the above? I have no idea. I refer back to Ryan being very complicated. It's just going to have to remain a mysterious puzzle piece that doesn't fit with anything else.
Another question is why would I spend time publishing all of this Ryan Conklin stuff over the last year. Going back to episode one, you may remember that the reviews of the show first consigned Ryan to being the dumb obnoxious guy that called Katelynn, "It". At the time I wasn't sure how many other people were seeing what I was seeing - that there was this other, very interesting person in Ryan who was very much not like how he was being described. What I thought I could do was put stuff out there that set the record straight and that's what I set out to do. Mind you, this was before there was even a hint that Ryan had been recalled. Obviously that whole situation then on its own helped to make it clear to the viewing public what an impressive and admirable person Ryan is.
Then in a short period of time, I realized I had gained a lot of affection for this person I was watching on television. I recall the previews for episode five (the 9/11 episode) and being very sad about whatever it was that was going to be shown the next week that seemed to trouble Ryan so. I was out of the country the first week of February, and I kept wondering what had happened. Watching the episode on Tivo was like one of the first things I did upon my return.
So the initial desire to put forth my take on the Ryan character, followed by the affection for the person, kept me going up through the summer. Then I also wanted to keep an "active" Ryan presence on the web while he was in Iraq, for his sake, even if it was just rehashing old material. I didn't want interest to wane. Last, there was the realization that I was seeing a core group of visitors to this site who were coming here every day and sometimes several times a day, and I felt some kind of responsibility to them to keep providing material and another Ryan fix.
I also have to say that I never had to worry about not providing new information. There were always a steady steam of people coming here with questions like, "Are Ryan and Belle still together?", "Did Ryan ever go to Iraq?", "Did Ryan write a book?" (You can't see this, but my eyes are rolling.)
Now as the year ends, things are necessarily different. Ryan will be coming home and he can focus on his own website and people's attention will rightfully be there. After the many hours I spent in 2009, I need to look to moving on to new things. I'm a one-man man, so Ryan had the majority of my attention during this time, but I can't keep that up forever. This site will live on and I expect to update it, because Ryan Conklin is still one of the most interesting people I have ever come across and I'm still an active follower. There's still excitement in the discovery of every new video from him. It's like finding a previously unknown home movie of James Dean, a new source of clues for a better understanding of a complex person who is still a bit of a mystery.
I mentioned that that it was frustrating trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. In fact, it was so much so that I decided that I can't. Maybe if had had the opportunity to spend time with him in real life I would gain the understanding, and say, "Ah-ha, now I understand everything," or I would find infinitely more nuances and my head would explode.
But my final conclusion, the one that I am quite content to settle on, and what anyone really ever needs to know about Ryan A. Conklin, is that he is a good man, in his heart and in his soul. And if you have been paying any attention to him and followed his story at all, you already know that.
