dear ten-year-old me
Jul. 31st, 2011 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraSo I had a birthday. I turned twenty. (Two decades, a fifth of a century, Not A Teenager Any More.) The day before, I made lemon cake with olive oil and rosemary in, and then I made blueberry sauce to put on top.
On the morning of my actual birthday, I sat down before work and wrote a letter to my ten-year-old self. In some ways I'm more like her than, say, my sixteen-year-old self was. And I want to show her this picture of me:
Description: I'm standing on a big tree that grew out into the river, with sunlight and water and grass, wearing a button-down white shirt and a waistcoat and brown trousers--a pocketwatch chain clearly visible dipping down from my waistcoat pocket--holding a straw boater, head shorn, barefoot, leaning on the tree and grinning.
It was pretty much entirely unposed; that was how I got dressed in the morning, dressing up slightly but not unusually for a day out, and then there was this big tree growing out into the water by where we were having our picnic and I wanted to scramble about on the tree barefoot so I did, and then the picture was taken.
One of the things I know is that my ten-year-old self could not have imagined my twenty-year-old self. One of the things I hope is that, if my ten-year-old self could have met my twenty-year-old self, she would have gone, "huh. Okay. Awesome."
The picture is from my birthday (observed), which was yesterday. Kate and I had adventures! First we went to the Chihuly exhibition at the MFA, which is closing soon and which had ridiculous lines and waiting, but which was gorgeous. The way the light goes through his pieces catches something in me--from the first couple of pieces I was a little worried I wouldn't think the exhibit was worth it, but then... yes, yes it was. There are colors that you can get in glass that I don't think you can get anywhere else.
Then we had a picnic by the Charles, with raspberries and cookies and the white sails of boats going past, and then we caught an afternoon tour at the Gibson House Museum. It's kind of a strange place. Probably better to go there when it's not quite as warm as yesterday, because it is not of course air conditioned and you end up taking a lot of stairs, but I would recommend it. Six dollars admission (for students) gets you forty-five minutes and four floors of Victorian peculiarities. The Society does minimal restoration on the house, basically just upkeep... so everything is slightly worn or faded, but everything is original, dating back in many cases to when the house was first set up.
It was originally bought by a New Money widow who moved into the Back Bay of Boston when it was first filled in from swampy riverbank. She was attempting to win a higher-class bride for her son, so she tried to make everything look more expensive than it was; then her son got married and brought the bride to the house; then the couple had three children, two girls and one boy; the boy inherited, and died without marrying or having children.
This last was a writer, probably gay, definitely delusional, who kept a copy of all his books in every room of the house and framed the letters he got from famous political figures in response to the fanmail he sent them. He kept the house largely as it was out of the belief that by 2000 it would be a museum to his memory and honor as a writer, and in fact set up a Society to keep it that way--the usual New England museum society didn't want it--so it is very directly as a consequence of his grand beliefs that we have this lovely and odd museum to fashions and technologies from the Victorian period up to the 1950s, when the writer died.
Today I have been writing--typing, mostly, again. With everything transferred into the Queen of Spades file, there's about 7.5k done on that. I also have the larger part of an outline. Given that it'll probably be a fairly short novel, that's a good start. If I had a week free, I would probably be able to fill in most of the draft, but... well.
I also am hoping to do some work on the still-untitled short story today, as well as finishing up Ideomancer slush from last week.
...and, of course, work on my presentation for the REU program. We're presenting our research at the end of this week; I'm presenting in front of my research group on Wednesday, as a practice for the other one. So I have to figure out what I'm going to talk about, and what I'm going to do if that one set of measurements doesn't actually work out in the next couple of days, and clip down a couple of videos so I can have some examples in my presentation.
Seems incredible that there are only a couple of weeks left in my program at all. After that, it's back to Minnesota for a couple of weeks, and then I will somehow be a junior in college. I'm already twenty. I can remember, very clearly, a lot of time when twenty was unimaginably old. Not necessarily for a person to be, but for me, specifically, to be.
On the other hand, the day after my birthday I wrote a letter to my thirty-year-old self, who I cannot imagine at all. So I think maybe it just goes on like this, on and on into your life until you look backward and forward and realize that every ten years you are more like your ten-years-past self than you possibly would've imagined then, and that your ten-years-on self is unimaginable, and every day of your life is easing you along in that chain.
I kind of like the thought that my thirty-year-old self will be more like me than I can currently imagine. I hope she's nice. You'll all meet her someday, and then you can let me know what you think.
On the morning of my actual birthday, I sat down before work and wrote a letter to my ten-year-old self. In some ways I'm more like her than, say, my sixteen-year-old self was. And I want to show her this picture of me:
Description: I'm standing on a big tree that grew out into the river, with sunlight and water and grass, wearing a button-down white shirt and a waistcoat and brown trousers--a pocketwatch chain clearly visible dipping down from my waistcoat pocket--holding a straw boater, head shorn, barefoot, leaning on the tree and grinning.
It was pretty much entirely unposed; that was how I got dressed in the morning, dressing up slightly but not unusually for a day out, and then there was this big tree growing out into the water by where we were having our picnic and I wanted to scramble about on the tree barefoot so I did, and then the picture was taken.
One of the things I know is that my ten-year-old self could not have imagined my twenty-year-old self. One of the things I hope is that, if my ten-year-old self could have met my twenty-year-old self, she would have gone, "huh. Okay. Awesome."
The picture is from my birthday (observed), which was yesterday. Kate and I had adventures! First we went to the Chihuly exhibition at the MFA, which is closing soon and which had ridiculous lines and waiting, but which was gorgeous. The way the light goes through his pieces catches something in me--from the first couple of pieces I was a little worried I wouldn't think the exhibit was worth it, but then... yes, yes it was. There are colors that you can get in glass that I don't think you can get anywhere else.
Then we had a picnic by the Charles, with raspberries and cookies and the white sails of boats going past, and then we caught an afternoon tour at the Gibson House Museum. It's kind of a strange place. Probably better to go there when it's not quite as warm as yesterday, because it is not of course air conditioned and you end up taking a lot of stairs, but I would recommend it. Six dollars admission (for students) gets you forty-five minutes and four floors of Victorian peculiarities. The Society does minimal restoration on the house, basically just upkeep... so everything is slightly worn or faded, but everything is original, dating back in many cases to when the house was first set up.
It was originally bought by a New Money widow who moved into the Back Bay of Boston when it was first filled in from swampy riverbank. She was attempting to win a higher-class bride for her son, so she tried to make everything look more expensive than it was; then her son got married and brought the bride to the house; then the couple had three children, two girls and one boy; the boy inherited, and died without marrying or having children.
This last was a writer, probably gay, definitely delusional, who kept a copy of all his books in every room of the house and framed the letters he got from famous political figures in response to the fanmail he sent them. He kept the house largely as it was out of the belief that by 2000 it would be a museum to his memory and honor as a writer, and in fact set up a Society to keep it that way--the usual New England museum society didn't want it--so it is very directly as a consequence of his grand beliefs that we have this lovely and odd museum to fashions and technologies from the Victorian period up to the 1950s, when the writer died.
Today I have been writing--typing, mostly, again. With everything transferred into the Queen of Spades file, there's about 7.5k done on that. I also have the larger part of an outline. Given that it'll probably be a fairly short novel, that's a good start. If I had a week free, I would probably be able to fill in most of the draft, but... well.
I also am hoping to do some work on the still-untitled short story today, as well as finishing up Ideomancer slush from last week.
...and, of course, work on my presentation for the REU program. We're presenting our research at the end of this week; I'm presenting in front of my research group on Wednesday, as a practice for the other one. So I have to figure out what I'm going to talk about, and what I'm going to do if that one set of measurements doesn't actually work out in the next couple of days, and clip down a couple of videos so I can have some examples in my presentation.
Seems incredible that there are only a couple of weeks left in my program at all. After that, it's back to Minnesota for a couple of weeks, and then I will somehow be a junior in college. I'm already twenty. I can remember, very clearly, a lot of time when twenty was unimaginably old. Not necessarily for a person to be, but for me, specifically, to be.
On the other hand, the day after my birthday I wrote a letter to my thirty-year-old self, who I cannot imagine at all. So I think maybe it just goes on like this, on and on into your life until you look backward and forward and realize that every ten years you are more like your ten-years-past self than you possibly would've imagined then, and that your ten-years-on self is unimaginable, and every day of your life is easing you along in that chain.
I kind of like the thought that my thirty-year-old self will be more like me than I can currently imagine. I hope she's nice. You'll all meet her someday, and then you can let me know what you think.