Nov 20, 2006 01:03
im taking a study break, doing some knitting, watching some shit on channel two about the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition aka World's Fair helf in San Francisco. apparently, a celebration of the completion of the panama canal, for which san francisco beat out hella other US cities and got to hold the 10 month long celebration. "the city that knew how" wowed a whopping 18 million visitors from around the world in its 10 months. it must have run from august 1914-may 1915 based on what ive read about it....my grandma was born on june 24th 1914, so she would have been a wee little newborn. Somehow in my quest to document her life i became the owner of a tiny piece of that worlds fair...its a tiny hand mirror, with perhaps a 2 inch diameter and a handle of the same length. theres a floral design on the back and the words "souvenir of worlds fair california 1915" etched in the center.
i really like old stuff. and lemme just clear things up, my concept of "old" is totally biased. first theres the fact that the women in my family (most notably the central figure of the entire patterson existence) have a tendency to live ridiculously long lives, and then theres the education ive been exposed to in the past 4 years. lets just say that anthropology sprinkled with lots of paleontology, geography, geology, and other earth sciences is just the Rx to make you feel like a really small speck on the timeline of existence.
so having this piece of history that is the same age as my grandma is strange, on the one hand it feels sooooo old but i feel like i should know better than to think that something thats approximately 92 years old is anything.
mostly im ranting, not wanting to get back to the reading marathon i started at about 1pm today. i think ill just fuck it and go to bed soon but i still cant figure out how on earth i have this mirror. i got it from my grandma when i was interviewing her for a big paper i wrote based on those interviews.....no thats a lie, i got it from her when i got a bunch of family shit from her for a presentation i did on self identity for an english class at CCC, but theres not logical reason for it to be hers, since she would have been so young. so the reason im so intrigued by it is cause it must have been her mothers, my great grandmas (none (like no knee) - italian for grandma i believe). and lets just say my memories of her are sort of mythical.
i guess it makes sense that people have a hard time thinking on a time scale that would encourage us to not completely fuck the world up. cause if we did we would realize how insignificant we are. i mean, im trippin about some mirror and some people that have lived their entire lives in the past century (my great grandma was born in 1889, so these people that im pretty much obsessed with have only experienced 117 years of the im not even gonna compare to the billions the earth has existed, millions we've evolved, thousands we've existed, and hundreds we've practiced bringing it all down)
with that, i need to get my hands on some (bio)archaeological materials. and that will probably lead me to want to get my hands on some paleontological materials. for now ive gotta settle on whatever "old" stuff i can dig up at grandmas house.
im gonna finish reading about how femur structure changed with the transition to maize agriculture in the americas...and love it.
dont stop believin',
stack, the speck, on the spectrum of time.