I am a packrat. A hoarder. A collector. Whatever you want to call it. I make excuses like “it’s genetic” (my grandparents all kept everything “in case it was useful someday”, almost to the point of pathology), “but what if I will want it eventually” and “nostalgia” and in the meantime, books and papers and …..well, mostly books pile up around me.
And right now my mom and my uncles are sorting through my grandfather’s house, and his lifetime of hoarding and saving everything that came through the door. It’s a daunting task, and a stressful one, and a sad one. How do you balance the longing to acknowledge the past with the desire to lead a simple(ish) life yourself, and the space limitations of modern middle-class living?
It’s made even more difficult, emotionally, by the fact that my family has not just a lengthy history, but a strong sense of history. We are all well aware that sometimes the most innocuous-looking things can turn out to be important. I just read a biography of a Tudor woman where most of the information for her life comes from household accounts. But, really, once the account books aren’t of any use for tax purposes or something similar, who wants to keep them around? But they are historically one of the best sources we have for daily life one or two or five hundred years ago.
We want to keep the important things, but how do we know what the important things are? What’s important now may not be important in one or two or five hundred years. And while there is an argument to be made about the cultural knowledge that comes from shifting priorities, I also can’t help but wish that more minutiae survived.
This is one reason that I’m so excited that the Library of Congress has the entire public Twitter archive now. Past Tweets may not be of huge significance (although some are, either culturally or personally), but the collection of cultural minutiae has the potential to be fascinating not only for current sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists, but for future historians as well. I just wish it were so easy to save and store the physical collections of minutiae as well.
(Apparently I really like the word "minutiae"...)
Showing posts with label nostalgia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nostalgia. Show all posts
28 May 2010
06 January 2010
In which I play with books
Well, my last few posts were depressing and horrible. Or, rather, horribly depressing. Good news! I went to the doctor, I got happy pills, I got my appetite back, and I feel like I can do things again.
Like enter a short story contest.
One of the things I do with my time is play with books. That sounds facetious. I volunteer at a charity shop (Cancer Research UK) and organize their book donations. We try not to have goods on the shop floor for more than a couple of weeks – after that, they get “culled” and go to one of the other shops in town, to get to a new customer base or something like that. So after I sort through the donations, I go through the books on the shelves, pulling the old ones. Then I price and set out new books from the donations.
It’s quite the process, really. I have so much power over these books! I decide whether they are in good enough condition to go out on the shelves (if they’re not, they get recycled in some way), or recent enough. Fiction isn’t a problem, of course, but textbooks and travel books especially – if they’re not from the 21st century, I toss them. I tossed one today that was a guide to Windows 95. I’m assuming that no one needs a user’s guide to Windows 95 for anything other than nostalgia value. Sometimes I feel bad about some of the travel guides, especially – it can be really interesting to see the differences in tourist advice, or popular areas, or prices over the years. But there’s a point when it’s interesting and a window where it’s too recent to be interesting, too old to be relevant. That window is when I put them in the big white bag.
I have a system of sorts for the storage room, too. Most of the books we get are, of course, fiction. They go on the built in shelves on the outside wall. They’re organized by size rather than anything else, purely for ease of stacking and access. Mass-market paperbacks are on the lowest shelf, just under eye-height, then trade paperbacks (slightly bigger, with slightly harder covers), and then on the top shelf are the large paperbacks – the ones that I’ve seen now as “airport editions” and things like that. Also on the top shelf are some of the non-fiction paperbacks: history, biography, etc. Basically that wall is for anything that you – I – would check out of a library.
Hardcovers are on the other wall, kind of in the same way. Fiction in one area, non-fiction in another. And then we have the reference/specialty books. Diet books, cookbooks (so many cookbooks), gardening books, bird-watching, languages, basically anything that doesn’t fit in with the other categories. They get a shelf of their own, with cookbooks getting a stack on the shelf right by the door. (Seriously. So many cookbooks.)
Kids books are separated into the ones that can go in the 50p bin (picture books, etc.) and the ones that are more for tweens and young adults, which are priced about the same as adult books are. We got a box a couple of months ago that was stacked full to overflowing with teen-girl type books. Some of them are still in the box. I’m shifting them as quickly as I can.
I’m shifting all the books as quickly as I can, really. We have five and a half shelves on the shop floor for books – three of them usually have paperbacks of various sizes, one has hardcover, and one has miscellaneous non-fiction, with a half-shelf near toys for the tween/young adult books. We sell quite a lot of books, and cull quite a lot on a regular basis, but the storage room never seems to diminish.
And some of that is because of days like today. I walked in today and I could not enter the book storage room. We’d gotten so many donations over Christmas (the last time I was in was December 22) that there was literally nowhere else to put the books. It took me at least two hours just to get things sorted, and I was absolutely ruthless about recycling books. If there was any doubt about condition or suitability, into the white recycling bag it went. I then put something like 60 books on the shelves – and one of my fellow volunteers had already done two shelves.
There were three or four boxes full of books today, as well as the mass of bags. I think they were part of an estate sale or something like that. They were nearly all older books, with quite a lot of cookbooks and gardening books and wine-making and things like that. This was one of the times that it was difficult for me to be ruthless when throwing them out (or not), even though I knew I had to be. I kept thinking of my grandparents’ house, which was, and I’m sure is still, crammed to the rafters with books. The collection reflects so much about my grandparents: their interests, hobbies, activities, and so on. I could tell, going through these boxes, what the person who’d had this collection was like in a similar way. I could picture my grandparents’ books going through the same treatment (once the family has pulled out the ones we personally want of course) – sorting through my grandparents’ lives with only minimal consideration for the emotion and history of the books, only looking at how saleable they are. I know it’s necessary, but it’s still difficult.
26 August 2009
My dad's visit
My dad came to visit at the beginning of August. It was lovely. We rented a car and were able to go around any number of places that I couldn't or wouldn't have gotten to on my own; we also spent some time just hanging out and trying to understand cricket.
Note: I still do not understand cricket. I understand it a little bit more now than I used to, but I think I need one or both of two things: 1 - to attend a live test match. 2 - a specific player to watch/follow through a game/series.
One of the nice things about my dad being here, and taking me around places, is that it reminds me of some of the things I like about this area of the country: the history. London is the obvious place for history, of course, and god knows I love going to London and going to the museums and turning a corner and seeing, say, the pub that Chaucer frequented (it's in Southwark) or Dickens (it's in the City and is actually quite dark inside) or whatever.
History in the Midlands, at least the history that is packaged for tourists, is much more of the 'normal people' form of history, where 'normal people' often means 'noble people who were active outside of London'. Pre-Industrial Revolution sites are stately homes of landed gentry, not usually royal (there are exceptions); post-Industrial Revolution sites are, you know, focused on the Industrial Revolution and its effects including the rise of the merchant/middle/industrialist class.
Dad suggested going to Newstead Abbey, but I have been there twice in the last ten years, and have less than no desire to go back. The Romantic poets tend to annoy me and I can't stand Byron as a personality. Instead, to satisfy the literary pilgrimage portion of the trip, we went to Eastwood. It made for a nice afternoon trip - we went to the main museum which also had quite a lot of information about mining in the area and daily life for the working class at the time, as well as Lawrence's life, and we went to the birthplace museum, in the house that Lawrence was actually born in. I quite like Lawrence, actually, and think that his writing often gets overshadowed by either the more 'experimental' modernist authors like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or people like that, or by the obscenity trial about Lady Chatterley's Lover. I really liked Lady Chatterley's Lover. I liked the writing style of Sons and Lovers, although I found the central relationship between Paul and his mother incredibly creepy. I also want to read Women in Love, but haven't gotten to it yet.
We also took a day and drove up to Gainsborough Old Hall. That was fantastic. We found out when we got up there that Gainsborough has a claim to be the place where King Canute 'tried' to stop the tide, so that's really cool in and of itself. The Old Hall, although smaller than other manor houses we've been to and completely surrounded by the town now, is a fantastic museum. The kitchen and banqueting hall area is set up as it would have been in the late fifteenth century, when Richard III visited, and the kitchen especially shows what a working medieval kitchen would have been like. The audio tour gets a touch long at times, but is informative without being boring. Gainsborough Old Hall was also a safe place for the Puritans/'Pilgrim Fathers' before the Dutch exile and journey to America. I can imagine that they do quite a lot there with living history/reenactment events - it's a perfect place for it.
Over the weekend that he was here, we did things slightly closer to home. First we went to Sudbury Hall. The Hall itself is fine - nice, but nothing really extraordinary. The Museum of Childhood, on the other hand, is amazing. A nice mix of display and interactive - including a 'chimney' that kids can climb through to see what it would have been like for chimney sweeps, a Victorian classroom, and a room on storytelling/books/imaginative play. It was a blast. We were there with my godmother and her granddaughters, and another family friend with her husband and mother-in-law. The girls loved the Museum of Childhood, even the older one who's fourteen. (She and I had a lovely squee-ing discussion at the Doctor Who exhibit that was part of the 'pop culture'/'collectibles' exhibit.) The eight-year-old was in heaven. She went through the chimney about ten times. There's also a lake on the estate, with about two dozen swans that we counted, so we got some relaxing "be in nature" time in as well. The other nice thing is that, no matter what, days at my godmother's are always full days with my godmother. If she comes in to Nottingham, then it's lunch and maybe an hour or two of shopping. If I go there, it's "Oh, no, we'd better drive you back because it's after dark now."
The Sunday my dad was here, we went to Chatsworth House. It's one of our favourite places to go - in fact, I had begged off a trip with some friends the week or so before because I knew that my dad would want to go. Chatsworth is so beautiful. The house is currently undergoing quite a bit of restoration, but is still open to visitors, and they have an exhibit inside called "Chatsworth at the Movies" or something like that. Obviously one of their main film connections is The Duchess, but there's also Pride and Prejudice, where Chatsworth is both the interior and the exterior for Pemberley (as it may have been for Austen herself), and an upcoming movie called The Wolfman which I don't really want to see, but might since it features Chatsworth. (...what? That's normal.)
Chatsworth was also hosting a Jaguar car show that day. It was an incredible, welcome coincidence, because car shows are one of the things that my dad and I do together when we can, and we both appreciate Jaguars greatly. It was nice. I miss cars sometimes.
We also wandered through the grounds. Gave up on the maze - we know there's a way in, because we could hear people in the center. We just couldn't figure it out. We wandered around the gardens for a while, just enjoying the views and the fresh air and the fountains and the beauty of the area. I even took a few pictures, which is quite rare for me.
We'd rented a car, as I said, and a GPS system to go with it, because driving on the other side of the road is difficult enough without also having to figure out how exactly to get places. The only time the GPS was a problem was in Gainsborough, where it told us that the Old Hall was at least half a mile away from where it actually was. On the way back from Chatsworth, we turned off the GPS (it wanted us to take the motorway, and traffic was backed up for miles to get there) and managed to find our own way back. Success!
We also did some Nottingham-touristy stuff: The Galleries of Justice and the Caves, both of which now do dramatised tours although I think I preferred the Caves a few years ago when it was an audio tour setup. Also we learned that there aren't really any cybercafes in Nottingham - one up on Mansfield Road, I think they said, and a few computers at the information centre. That's it - at least, that's all that the information centre told us about. (I wonder if that would be a feasible small business idea, or if there are enough wireless access points around to make it unnecessary?)
While my dad was here, we also spent some time just chilling. I read Silks, by Dick Francis (which I reviewed on my new book blog, where you can also find some comments about literary pilgrimages a la our Eastwood trip), we watched The Ashes, we went to two pub quizzes (my normal monthly PGSA one and a commercially-provided one at the carvery attached to the hotel), and we ate takeaways. All in all, a good trip.
Note: I still do not understand cricket. I understand it a little bit more now than I used to, but I think I need one or both of two things: 1 - to attend a live test match. 2 - a specific player to watch/follow through a game/series.
One of the nice things about my dad being here, and taking me around places, is that it reminds me of some of the things I like about this area of the country: the history. London is the obvious place for history, of course, and god knows I love going to London and going to the museums and turning a corner and seeing, say, the pub that Chaucer frequented (it's in Southwark) or Dickens (it's in the City and is actually quite dark inside) or whatever.
History in the Midlands, at least the history that is packaged for tourists, is much more of the 'normal people' form of history, where 'normal people' often means 'noble people who were active outside of London'. Pre-Industrial Revolution sites are stately homes of landed gentry, not usually royal (there are exceptions); post-Industrial Revolution sites are, you know, focused on the Industrial Revolution and its effects including the rise of the merchant/middle/industrialist class.
Dad suggested going to Newstead Abbey, but I have been there twice in the last ten years, and have less than no desire to go back. The Romantic poets tend to annoy me and I can't stand Byron as a personality. Instead, to satisfy the literary pilgrimage portion of the trip, we went to Eastwood. It made for a nice afternoon trip - we went to the main museum which also had quite a lot of information about mining in the area and daily life for the working class at the time, as well as Lawrence's life, and we went to the birthplace museum, in the house that Lawrence was actually born in. I quite like Lawrence, actually, and think that his writing often gets overshadowed by either the more 'experimental' modernist authors like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or people like that, or by the obscenity trial about Lady Chatterley's Lover. I really liked Lady Chatterley's Lover. I liked the writing style of Sons and Lovers, although I found the central relationship between Paul and his mother incredibly creepy. I also want to read Women in Love, but haven't gotten to it yet.
We also took a day and drove up to Gainsborough Old Hall. That was fantastic. We found out when we got up there that Gainsborough has a claim to be the place where King Canute 'tried' to stop the tide, so that's really cool in and of itself. The Old Hall, although smaller than other manor houses we've been to and completely surrounded by the town now, is a fantastic museum. The kitchen and banqueting hall area is set up as it would have been in the late fifteenth century, when Richard III visited, and the kitchen especially shows what a working medieval kitchen would have been like. The audio tour gets a touch long at times, but is informative without being boring. Gainsborough Old Hall was also a safe place for the Puritans/'Pilgrim Fathers' before the Dutch exile and journey to America. I can imagine that they do quite a lot there with living history/reenactment events - it's a perfect place for it.
Over the weekend that he was here, we did things slightly closer to home. First we went to Sudbury Hall. The Hall itself is fine - nice, but nothing really extraordinary. The Museum of Childhood, on the other hand, is amazing. A nice mix of display and interactive - including a 'chimney' that kids can climb through to see what it would have been like for chimney sweeps, a Victorian classroom, and a room on storytelling/books/imaginative play. It was a blast. We were there with my godmother and her granddaughters, and another family friend with her husband and mother-in-law. The girls loved the Museum of Childhood, even the older one who's fourteen. (She and I had a lovely squee-ing discussion at the Doctor Who exhibit that was part of the 'pop culture'/'collectibles' exhibit.) The eight-year-old was in heaven. She went through the chimney about ten times. There's also a lake on the estate, with about two dozen swans that we counted, so we got some relaxing "be in nature" time in as well. The other nice thing is that, no matter what, days at my godmother's are always full days with my godmother. If she comes in to Nottingham, then it's lunch and maybe an hour or two of shopping. If I go there, it's "Oh, no, we'd better drive you back because it's after dark now."
The Sunday my dad was here, we went to Chatsworth House. It's one of our favourite places to go - in fact, I had begged off a trip with some friends the week or so before because I knew that my dad would want to go. Chatsworth is so beautiful. The house is currently undergoing quite a bit of restoration, but is still open to visitors, and they have an exhibit inside called "Chatsworth at the Movies" or something like that. Obviously one of their main film connections is The Duchess, but there's also Pride and Prejudice, where Chatsworth is both the interior and the exterior for Pemberley (as it may have been for Austen herself), and an upcoming movie called The Wolfman which I don't really want to see, but might since it features Chatsworth. (...what? That's normal.)
Chatsworth was also hosting a Jaguar car show that day. It was an incredible, welcome coincidence, because car shows are one of the things that my dad and I do together when we can, and we both appreciate Jaguars greatly. It was nice. I miss cars sometimes.
We also wandered through the grounds. Gave up on the maze - we know there's a way in, because we could hear people in the center. We just couldn't figure it out. We wandered around the gardens for a while, just enjoying the views and the fresh air and the fountains and the beauty of the area. I even took a few pictures, which is quite rare for me.
We'd rented a car, as I said, and a GPS system to go with it, because driving on the other side of the road is difficult enough without also having to figure out how exactly to get places. The only time the GPS was a problem was in Gainsborough, where it told us that the Old Hall was at least half a mile away from where it actually was. On the way back from Chatsworth, we turned off the GPS (it wanted us to take the motorway, and traffic was backed up for miles to get there) and managed to find our own way back. Success!
We also did some Nottingham-touristy stuff: The Galleries of Justice and the Caves, both of which now do dramatised tours although I think I preferred the Caves a few years ago when it was an audio tour setup. Also we learned that there aren't really any cybercafes in Nottingham - one up on Mansfield Road, I think they said, and a few computers at the information centre. That's it - at least, that's all that the information centre told us about. (I wonder if that would be a feasible small business idea, or if there are enough wireless access points around to make it unnecessary?)
While my dad was here, we also spent some time just chilling. I read Silks, by Dick Francis (which I reviewed on my new book blog, where you can also find some comments about literary pilgrimages a la our Eastwood trip), we watched The Ashes, we went to two pub quizzes (my normal monthly PGSA one and a commercially-provided one at the carvery attached to the hotel), and we ate takeaways. All in all, a good trip.
23 May 2009
What if.....
The greatest stories come out of “what if” questions. Personally, I really like speculative fiction, especially parallel universe and time travel stories. They usually come out of the biggest “what if” questions. What if the Axis powers had won World War 2, or the Confederacy had won the Civil War? What if JFK were never assassinated? How would the world be different?
“What if” questions are also why I write romance, when I write anything non-academic (an increasingly rare occurrence). Since most of my what-ifs revolve around my love life (or lack thereof), my story writing is a way for me to come to terms with my own what-ifs. The biggest one is, of course, the summer before I went to Slovakia. What if I’d stayed in the US instead? My life would be incredibly different right now.*
What-ifs often present themselves right away. You walk away from a situation thinking, “Oh, I should have done x or said y”. You torture yourself for minutes, hours, or days with different variants of what you could have done or said to make things turn out differently. But the thing about what-ifs is that you can’t really evaluate them until time has passed, until your life has progressed beyond that turning point. I don’t want to get all fatalistic about stuff, but if things are meant to happen, they will happen. What-ifs suck at the time – and for years afterward in some cases – but in the end you may end up where you are supposed to be, even if it’s not where you planned and imagined.
And that’s why I write romances based (loosely) around my what-ifs. I love my life right here, right now, but I need to explore my what-ifs, and give myself a chance – even if it’s a fictional chance – to live out the life I am not leading.
*Of course, the what-if in that case has nothing to do with my actually going to Slovakia, since that was all in place before the what-if moment. But it’s complicated to explain without going into details, so it’s easier just to blame the what-if on Slovakia.
“What if” questions are also why I write romance, when I write anything non-academic (an increasingly rare occurrence). Since most of my what-ifs revolve around my love life (or lack thereof), my story writing is a way for me to come to terms with my own what-ifs. The biggest one is, of course, the summer before I went to Slovakia. What if I’d stayed in the US instead? My life would be incredibly different right now.*
What-ifs often present themselves right away. You walk away from a situation thinking, “Oh, I should have done x or said y”. You torture yourself for minutes, hours, or days with different variants of what you could have done or said to make things turn out differently. But the thing about what-ifs is that you can’t really evaluate them until time has passed, until your life has progressed beyond that turning point. I don’t want to get all fatalistic about stuff, but if things are meant to happen, they will happen. What-ifs suck at the time – and for years afterward in some cases – but in the end you may end up where you are supposed to be, even if it’s not where you planned and imagined.
And that’s why I write romances based (loosely) around my what-ifs. I love my life right here, right now, but I need to explore my what-ifs, and give myself a chance – even if it’s a fictional chance – to live out the life I am not leading.
*Of course, the what-if in that case has nothing to do with my actually going to Slovakia, since that was all in place before the what-if moment. But it’s complicated to explain without going into details, so it’s easier just to blame the what-if on Slovakia.
20 November 2008
Two emotional/philosophical things have been on my mind lately. I am putting them in one entry because they are sort of connected.
First is the idea of living in the moment. People keep saying that you should “live in the moment” and enjoy things as they happen without thinking too much of what the future holds. The idea is that if you're always looking ahead, you miss out on the things that are happening now.
The problem is that our culture is not set up to live in the moment. Take my current situation. I am a graduate student on a one-year master's program, studying something that I love in a city that I love. And the first thing that my course convener said to me when I arrived? “Have you thought about what you're doing next?” This was before I had even officially chosen what classes I was going to take this year. The number one question that I get is “what are you going to do next?” This beats even “are you enjoying it” and “what are you studying” for frequency of questions that I get asked.
While I understand that it is necessary to look to the future, and that certain paths require a lot of advance planning, it is incredibly frustrating to me. I just got here! I am not ready to think about leaving yet! Can't I just enjoy my year here without worrying about what it's going to lead to? Part of the reason I chose this program was in the hopes that it will give me more clarity about what I want to do with my life – particularly what academic area I want to focus on. However, that can't happen until I actually experience this year. And, actually, the way that part of the course is organized, it won't happen until next semester, when I am taking more literature classes. I want to experience this year without the question of “what's next” hanging over my head. The question is not going to go away – even now it is always in the back of my mind – but I need it to stay in the back of my mind and not be constantly in the forefront.
The other thing, which is connected because it occasionally keeps me from fully experiencing this year, is looking to the past. I went back to Slovakia last week, which gave me a sense of closure about my experience there. However, the second-most common question I got (after “what's next for you”) was “when are you coming back?” The thing is, I'm not. If I can't find a job/place for me here in the UK, I will consider going back to Slovakia and teaching English at one of the universities or something similar. But I do not think that I will go back to the ELCA program and teach at one of the high schools. I don't even think that I will go back independently and teach at one of the high schools. I've done it. It's over.
I also have a friend in Slovakia – I love her dearly – who is constantly trying to improve her English by taking tests. Which she then sends to me to correct for her. And sometimes she sends me her students' work to correct. And it's really starting to bother me, because the only time she talks to me is when she has things she wants me to do. And the things she wants me to do are either things she should be doing herself, or things that I am not in a mental place to do anymore.
It's not that I don't love Slovakia – I do, and I will always treasure my time there and my friends there. But that is not my life right now. I need to focus on my life here and my experience here, and not feel constantly dragged back to what I was doing before.
It should not be this hard to be able to focus on this year and what is happening now. I hate that both the past and the future are pulling me away from what should be a good, meaningful experience.
First is the idea of living in the moment. People keep saying that you should “live in the moment” and enjoy things as they happen without thinking too much of what the future holds. The idea is that if you're always looking ahead, you miss out on the things that are happening now.
The problem is that our culture is not set up to live in the moment. Take my current situation. I am a graduate student on a one-year master's program, studying something that I love in a city that I love. And the first thing that my course convener said to me when I arrived? “Have you thought about what you're doing next?” This was before I had even officially chosen what classes I was going to take this year. The number one question that I get is “what are you going to do next?” This beats even “are you enjoying it” and “what are you studying” for frequency of questions that I get asked.
While I understand that it is necessary to look to the future, and that certain paths require a lot of advance planning, it is incredibly frustrating to me. I just got here! I am not ready to think about leaving yet! Can't I just enjoy my year here without worrying about what it's going to lead to? Part of the reason I chose this program was in the hopes that it will give me more clarity about what I want to do with my life – particularly what academic area I want to focus on. However, that can't happen until I actually experience this year. And, actually, the way that part of the course is organized, it won't happen until next semester, when I am taking more literature classes. I want to experience this year without the question of “what's next” hanging over my head. The question is not going to go away – even now it is always in the back of my mind – but I need it to stay in the back of my mind and not be constantly in the forefront.
The other thing, which is connected because it occasionally keeps me from fully experiencing this year, is looking to the past. I went back to Slovakia last week, which gave me a sense of closure about my experience there. However, the second-most common question I got (after “what's next for you”) was “when are you coming back?” The thing is, I'm not. If I can't find a job/place for me here in the UK, I will consider going back to Slovakia and teaching English at one of the universities or something similar. But I do not think that I will go back to the ELCA program and teach at one of the high schools. I don't even think that I will go back independently and teach at one of the high schools. I've done it. It's over.
I also have a friend in Slovakia – I love her dearly – who is constantly trying to improve her English by taking tests. Which she then sends to me to correct for her. And sometimes she sends me her students' work to correct. And it's really starting to bother me, because the only time she talks to me is when she has things she wants me to do. And the things she wants me to do are either things she should be doing herself, or things that I am not in a mental place to do anymore.
It's not that I don't love Slovakia – I do, and I will always treasure my time there and my friends there. But that is not my life right now. I need to focus on my life here and my experience here, and not feel constantly dragged back to what I was doing before.
It should not be this hard to be able to focus on this year and what is happening now. I hate that both the past and the future are pulling me away from what should be a good, meaningful experience.
14 October 2008
American football
Football is one of my joys in life. I have a lot of friends, mostly back in the States, who do not understand football and who especially do not understand the joy I get out of football. They see it as a vulgar game, incomprehensible, filled with big guys running into each other. And they're right – football, American football, can be incomprehensible, filled with big guys running into each other and stupid twenty-somethings running off their mouths. But to me, football is so much more than that.
I try to describe football to people as a chess game. Each play is like a mini chess game. The analogy doesn't really hold up that well, but bear with me. Each piece on the board – each player – can move in a certain way, and not in others. The offensive linemen can only go so far, the defensive backs can only go certain places. Each player has their role and if they overstep that role, they are penalized. The movement of the players appears chaotic and random, but looked at closely (and done well) it's very choreographed and well-organized.
Football is also about emotion for me. It's about spending every Friday and Saturday dressed in red, watching the Tanagers, the 'Yotes, or the Huskers (on TV). It's about celebrating when my brother makes a beautiful pass that's beautifully caught in the end zone. (And then about hearing his story about having to go and celebrate in the end zone by himself....) It's about the Domino's pizza arriving before Peter did on a Monday night. It's about the history of the game – recognizing the names of the announcers and the coaches because you watched them play, or because Dad tells stories about watching them play. It's about seeing former players at Homecoming games – or non-Homecoming games – and reminiscing. It's the smell of home-baked cookies on Sunday afternoon and the sight of the boys filling up our kitchen and living room eating them all before taking the remnants home to their roommates.
I miss football.
I try to describe football to people as a chess game. Each play is like a mini chess game. The analogy doesn't really hold up that well, but bear with me. Each piece on the board – each player – can move in a certain way, and not in others. The offensive linemen can only go so far, the defensive backs can only go certain places. Each player has their role and if they overstep that role, they are penalized. The movement of the players appears chaotic and random, but looked at closely (and done well) it's very choreographed and well-organized.
Football is also about emotion for me. It's about spending every Friday and Saturday dressed in red, watching the Tanagers, the 'Yotes, or the Huskers (on TV). It's about celebrating when my brother makes a beautiful pass that's beautifully caught in the end zone. (And then about hearing his story about having to go and celebrate in the end zone by himself....) It's about the Domino's pizza arriving before Peter did on a Monday night. It's about the history of the game – recognizing the names of the announcers and the coaches because you watched them play, or because Dad tells stories about watching them play. It's about seeing former players at Homecoming games – or non-Homecoming games – and reminiscing. It's the smell of home-baked cookies on Sunday afternoon and the sight of the boys filling up our kitchen and living room eating them all before taking the remnants home to their roommates.
I miss football.
08 August 2008
How long does it take for history to become meaningful? There are several things right now that have made me think about this question. First, my 5-year college reunion is this fall. Second, my 10-year high school reunion is next summer. And third, I just got back from an “alumni choir” event that featured alums from the 1940s through the end of the century.
The alumni choir event was awesome (again. This is the second year it’s happened, and that I’ve attended even though I wasn’t a singer with them, but that’s something for the livejournal rather than this blog) but there was a dearth of singers from the last twenty years. Some of this is probably due to lack of funds or time spent establishing family and careers. But some of it is quite possibly due to the lack of “historical” meaning that my generation has for its college time.
Simply speaking, we’re not old enough yet. When we - or at least, when I - go back to campus, it feels like I’m a student again. I emotionally expect things to be like they were when I was a student there. I want to relive the time when I was a student there, not just remember it. And when I can’t, when things are different, it hurts. It feels almost like a betrayal. Intellectually, I know that nothing is constant, that things always change, and that most of the changes are incredibly good. Emotionally, I have a hard time accepting it. I don’t have the distance yet to remember my college days without wanting to relive them.
I think I do with high school, though, or at least I’m getting there. When I go back to my high school (as I did at the beginning of July for community theatre), I no longer feel as much need to wander the halls and reminisce. When I see friends from high school, I don’t feel as much pressure of memory as I still do with my college friends. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but I’m a lot closer.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to handle it this fall - I’ll be back in a town that I adore, but I’ll be there without the people who were with me before and for a slightly different reason than before. I’m sure that the first few weeks, I’ll be trying to relive and recreate my experience of six/seven years ago. With familiarity and routine, I’m hoping that will fade.
The alumni choir event was awesome (again. This is the second year it’s happened, and that I’ve attended even though I wasn’t a singer with them, but that’s something for the livejournal rather than this blog) but there was a dearth of singers from the last twenty years. Some of this is probably due to lack of funds or time spent establishing family and careers. But some of it is quite possibly due to the lack of “historical” meaning that my generation has for its college time.
Simply speaking, we’re not old enough yet. When we - or at least, when I - go back to campus, it feels like I’m a student again. I emotionally expect things to be like they were when I was a student there. I want to relive the time when I was a student there, not just remember it. And when I can’t, when things are different, it hurts. It feels almost like a betrayal. Intellectually, I know that nothing is constant, that things always change, and that most of the changes are incredibly good. Emotionally, I have a hard time accepting it. I don’t have the distance yet to remember my college days without wanting to relive them.
I think I do with high school, though, or at least I’m getting there. When I go back to my high school (as I did at the beginning of July for community theatre), I no longer feel as much need to wander the halls and reminisce. When I see friends from high school, I don’t feel as much pressure of memory as I still do with my college friends. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but I’m a lot closer.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to handle it this fall - I’ll be back in a town that I adore, but I’ll be there without the people who were with me before and for a slightly different reason than before. I’m sure that the first few weeks, I’ll be trying to relive and recreate my experience of six/seven years ago. With familiarity and routine, I’m hoping that will fade.
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