Walkabout, Day 9
Apr. 11th, 2009 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthNote that this one gets into what some may consider to be the TMI range about feminine type stuff. Just thought I should preface with the warning.
I'd been feeling very, very crappy on day 8, and not so happy on day 7, and when I woke up yesterday I found out why - mother nature's sometimes monthly occurrence. I'm never really sure when to expect to get my period, and though I've been getting it every 5 - 8 weeks recently (this time it was 5), still I think my brain is still stuck in 2006 - 2007 mode, when I didn't get it for 16 months and I was diagnosed with PCOS (the link is to the post where I explain what that is and what it means, no point in my doing so again. ;) ) The diagnosis was a relief, but - oddly enough - it coincided with the beginning of a time in my life when I actually started getting my period semi-regularly without using birth control, almost certainly because of a change in my diet and a vast improvement in my level of physical fitness. Still, though it's getting silly after almost 2 years of regularity, it still always comes as a surprise. What does that have to do with anything, though?
Yesterday morning, I woke up in Lexington, VA, and headed over to Stonewall Jackson's house. This is one of many houses where he lived, with the only difference in this one being that he actually owned it. He actually was probably there less than other places in his life. Still, the house is nicely restored and contains entirely period furniture, some of which actually belonged to the Jacksons, and though I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside, still I'm glad I did the little tour, because it wasn't bad. I generally find house tours to be a waste of time - they're usually expensive, often privately run (thus no photos) and small, and just don't interest me as much as bloody battlefields - but all in all, I think it was probably worth the stop. And one thing about it struck me as decidedly odd, though it took me most of the tour to figure out what: I was with a group of 4 or 5 adults and 4 kids, and all but one of the adults and all but one of the kids were girls.
Civil War type things, like gaming and geek type things, attract mostly boys. Talking to Bjorn the nice tour guide at Shiloh, he mentioned that if I was interested in the war I should be a ranger for a summer, because they ALWAYS need women rangers. Indeed, in my experience, a high majority of the women present at any Civil War site are there with their husbands, and if that means there are a lot of women, that's more a sign of the fact that most of the men interested in the war are older, and therefore married. I'm not saying that these women are there against there will - I'm sure many of them are really into it, and many of the others are at least interested - but I also suspect that for many couples it's a compromise, as in, "we'll go to the Civil War museum and I'll behave, and in exchange you'll go to this place that I like, and you'll behave." Thus, to be on a group with so many women, reflecting on the ranger thing, just has me thinking a lot about femininity and such things.
I've never been much of a girl. In elementary school, when all the other girls hit that point where they started talking about boys and wearing makeup (at my school, it was right around the transition into fourth grade) I completely failed to keep up, thought wearing make up was ridiculous (still do except for theater or other cool uses or for covering up something extreme - okay, maybe not ridiculous, but a little silly, anyway ;) ), thought New Kids On the Block were the stupidest thing ever (wow, that dates me...and to make it worse, in true thinks-she's-cooler fashion, I'd never actually heard a song by New Kids...), and couldn't imagine why anyone would want anything to do with boys, all they do is tease you (my frame of reference, after all, was my older brother). And though I started to wear a bra in 6th grade, I was otherwise far behind the curve physically, too. Though I spotted when I was 12, it turned out that this wasn't me getting my first period, it was me breaking my hymen while horse back riding, though I didn't discover that until the time came to lose my virginity and there was no blood, much to the surprise of both of us - but because I thought this was my first period, I never bothered to pay attention after that, so I don't actually know when I did get my first, but it was almost certainly in high school; I can count the number of times I got my period the whole time I was in HS (and probably so could my friends, because I tended to whine shamefully and loudly when it happened), and I didn't get it once my entire freshman year of college.
As I got older, my interests also tended away from girly things. Though I learned to sew when very young, and have maintained that interest, I can't really think of any other stereotypically girl habits I've got. I've never really liked to shop, and have grown to like it less the older I've gotten, and I don't generally get interested in boys. Oh, I might see a guy and think, "he's cute," or even, "he's hot," but that doesn't in anyway lead to an interest in actually messing around with him; I tend to be completely uninterested in physical interaction except in extreme cases (of which only two have arisen in my life, and only one of which has actually led to a relationship). Furthermore, though I've got wide hips, I carry most of my weight in my belly which means I don't have a great waist, and I'm small breasted - I've got a feminine face, but not a great body (my best feature is my legs...) - and thus I've never felt that I look very feminine either (note the careful wording on that - when I think of it objectively, I actually think I look fine; I could stand to lose 15 to 20 pounds, but other than that I'm an attractive woman. My self perception, on the other hand, is a completely different matter).
I've come to know a lot of girl geeks, but when I was younger I only knew one (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
claireon) and all my other friends were boys. In MS, there was Cynthia, but again, all boys - and we were brought together more because no one liked any of us than out of common interests. HS was definitely better - and the introduction to a small but devoted group of geeks (ultima_baka and his Magic the Gathering addiction; Adam and his Star Trek - I was already a huge Trekkie by then; Minh and his anime and video games) led me to take up all kinds of new hobbies. Going in to HS, I was already a Trekkie, fantasy reading, Star Wars watching, Beatles loving, Civil War buff. By the time I left high school, under the influence of my friends, I was also a Magic playing, anime watching, video game playing, even bigger Trekkie, having only roleplayed twice but wanting to do so again.
However, all of this is just rambling, except that it tends to something that has really been on my mind the last year and change. I feel like I botched an important part of my life the first time around. I was completely burned out my senior year of high school, with the result that when the time came to apply to college, I only sent in 1 application - the one for SUNY, on which you could apply to up to four SUNY schools - and I wrote in Binghamton, Geneseo, Stony Brook, and New Paltz. In order, two of these are good schools, one is average, and one is mediocre; but I didn't care. I did no research and I put in no effort. Come spring, I got acceptances from all four, and trying to pick between Geneseo and Binghamton, I only looked at two factors.
1. Size. Binghamton had about 12,000 students and Geneseo had about 3,000. My experience at Stuy vs. Manhattan East (my middle school) had taught me an important lesson: bigger schools are better because I have a better chance of meeting people like me. After all, I'd had no friends in middle school except those of convenience, and, in 8th grade, the beginnings of a friendship with a 7th grader named Adam, and acquaintance with a girl from my Hebrew School -claireon (the same Adam I mention above in talking about high school - the only one of those relationships in middle school that really lasted). Granted, some of my experience in Stuy had been luck - of my four good friends there, three were in my homeroom, and the other was Adam - but even so, bigger was clearly better.
2. Japanese. My senior year of high school had been a disaster in an important way. The previous summer, an Intel project I had been doing as an internship fell apart completely after barely getting of the ground, and I was struggling with Calculus (actually, I was doing fine in Cal, my grades were great, but I didn't feel good or confident about it) and all of this had meant that in fall I'd decided to give up my dream of becoming an astronomer (certainly a major factor in my burned-out-ness.) The decision not to do an Intel had left a gap in my class schedule, which I had to fill, and got bullied byultima_baka in to filling it with Japanese. By the time I had to choose a college, though I was already tentatively leaning towards being a history major, the one thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to continue taking Japanese. Geneseo offered a study abroad program, but only one year of language study. Binghamton, on the other hand, had three years of language. And, I discovered, a student at one SUNY could do the study abroad of any other SUNY school.
Thus, the decision was simple: go to Binghamton.
Looking back with 20-20 hindsight, I can see how different my life would have been if I'd put more effort into this decision. For example, I wanted to study early American history (roughly, the Revolution to Reconstruction). A non-burned out me would have found a college that actually had a program in this. Instead, Binghamton only offered one class in this entire time period (Civil War and Reconstruction, which I took and didn't enjoy at all for various reasons). A non-burned out me might have considered that my grades in Cal actually meant something, and not given up on science. Basically, things might have turned out very different if only I'd been more with it in a 6 month period when I was 16 and 17.
(lmao, I've managed to lose track of the very salient and strong point that tied this bit of rambling into the first bit of rambling about femininity...ha!)
I'm not sorry I went to Binghamton. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have met a lot of great people. The experiences I had there, even with the not so great people, helped me to learn a lot about myself and how to interact with others. I was very immature when I got to college, and I left undergrad a much better person, and even better still I think after grad school (though I've been slipping the last couple of years, again for various reasons, most lack of practice in important social skills caused by the small social circle I maintain in NYC). That's not the point. The point is that, looking ahead, I've been trying to figure out which of these cut off avenues still interest me.
(it's really bugging me that I can't remember what my awesome point was...damn it all...this isn't it, but oh well)
I've gotten more girly, not less, since I've gotten older. Some of this was definitely being in a five year relationship; some of it was that I finally finished the physical maturing that most of my peers finished by the time they were 14; some of it was exploring my sexuality when I got a crush on a girl; some of it was getting to wear big flouncy dresses at LARPs and discovering that I liked to both make and wear them; some of it was the romance novels I started reading occasionally in HS. I've always felt, though, that it was a strength rather than a weakness that I was a girl who was drawn to boy-ish topics like history, fantasy and role playing. This has cost me dearly, also (I've long believed that had I been a boy my internship in the summer after 11th grade wouldn't have fallen apart, and again, how different things might be now!) but I wouldn't trade it. And now I'm starting to wonder, should I use it? If there are places that will welcome me into the field I'm interested in precisely because I'm a girl, should I go for it?
But there's the rub! See, in the conversation with Bjorn the tour guide, the painful truth was obvious: girl rangers aren't wanted to talk about bloody battles, troop movements, or generals. Girls are wanted to talk about girl things like female nurses or wives on the battlefield - the things that a wife along at the battlefield might want to hear, while her husband is learning about the blood and guts. A girl reenacter is in the same boat. Life is too short for me to want to waste time learning about things that don't interest me - and I don't have any interest in being shoe horned in to a role.
Ah well. That really wasn't my overall point, but I still can't remember what was, which is incredibly frustrating. I guess really it's just that these are the two things on my mind. It's not that I don't like what I do - I do, and it's lucrative - but I'd still ultimately like to build a career in one of the areas that I've always been passionate about - science and/or history - but I don't want to move forward until I figure out what I really want in that regard. And even then...I still won't be able to do it right, because this time I'll be doing it while holding down a job that keeps me in NYC, which means I'll have to pick a school in the city, and while granted there are some great schools in the five boroughs, it's still a restricted list, the moreso because some of the best (ie, NYU, Columbia) won't be interested in taking an approaching-30 undergrad. And meanwhile, the girl stuff is especially poignant to me right now, too: I'm now less than a week from the 3 year anniversary of my break up (though it depends on how you slice it; the day I went in and said I think we need to break up was April 17th, 2006; I don't know the actual date when we stopped trying to make it work, but it was about 6 weeks later in May; we'd lived apart the whole interim time, though, and though we'd had a handful of dates, there really wasn't much more of a relationship after the 17th, and that's generally been the date in my mind when it was over) and thus I think it's understandable that such things occupy my thoughts.
Of course, my lack of girliness hasn't stopped me from attracting men. Instead, it's meant that I have difficulty being attracted to men, when is an equally if not more thorny problem. At the rate I've exhibited so far, I seem to get a crush ever 5 years (one when I was 18; one when I was 22 or 23) - if this keeps up, the one I get at 28 better work out, because I won't get that many more chances! ;)
My next intended destination after Stonewall's house was Winchester, VA. Winchester seemed to have a small collection of semi-interesting museum type things, and so I headed north. While I was going, though, I passed a name that was vaguely familiar - New Market - and sure enough, there was a battlefield there, and I decided to get off even though I still wasn't feeling well and I was now reaching a critical stage of hungry.
I'm glad I did, if not for the usual reasons. Sure, it was a nice if small battlefield; the reproduction of the farm at the site was quite interesting too, but that wasn't what was fascinating about this battlefield. It also hosted a museum called "The Hall of Valor," and stopping in, it became clear what was different about New Market. The museum and the battlefield site weren't run by the Parks Department; both were owned and operated by the Virginia Military Institute (located in Lexington, and where Jackson used to teach). The result was a truly bizarre, skewed account of history as one would expect when it's being told by a private entity with a stake in the interpretation (not that the government doesn't have a stake, but it's not the same). VMI's goal was simple: make VMI cadets heroes. See, at the battle, of a few companies of cadets participated (250 in all). They were very young (mostly 14 to 17) and many were the sons of prominent Virginians (there's the money and importance part). They clearly played some kind of role in the battle, though I'm loath to try to say what since what I learned about the battle was all filtered through the lens of VMI's stake in retelling it, but they suffered a 20% casualty rate, which is definitely something. But I couldn't help but thinking: what REALLY happened? How important was this, really? This entire complex was an example of public memory gone wrong - not that it wasn't well done, not that it wasn't interesting even aside from this overarching issue - a group determined to see that an event is understood in a particular way which may or may not be aligned with the facts. Indeed, I fear that they did the cadets a grave disservice: because based on what was related, my instincts suggest that the boys actually DID play an important (if not, perhaps, pivotal) role in the battle, but because of the way the whole place was so heavily skewed, I actually became entirely skeptical of that role, whereas a more balanced retelling would have enabled the viewer to deduce for themselves just how critical and heroic these boys were. Of course, that's only from the point of view of me, one over-educated enthusiast with an interest in bias. I can only imagine what the other people there thought.
Oh, and another side effect of the bias? It's the first place I've been - even more than Jackson's house - that I felt a distinct southern bias in the depictions. It made me wonder what the history teachers are telling the kids at VMI...
So while I was pretty not good, I'm still glad that I stopped, and if I didn't wander around as much as I might of, still it was an interesting battlefield. And the museum had a neat collection of late 19th century Civil War art.
From there, I pressed on to Winchester, checked into a hotel, grabbed lunch, grabbed dinner, and sat down to watch the game. It's only four games into the season and everyone is still settling in to their roles, so aside from a little private whining toultima_baka about the outcome, I'm actually not concerned. What I will say is that so far, we've played four, and all four have been nail biters (two losses and two wins, but all four hard fought on both sides, close games, and none really decided until the last inning). If the entire season is like this, I don't think I'll make it.
I had made some plans to wander around Winchester today, but the weather is foul, and so now I'm not really sure what I'm going to do. ;) However, at least I got this written...though I still can't remember what my awesome, unifying point was...:(
I'd been feeling very, very crappy on day 8, and not so happy on day 7, and when I woke up yesterday I found out why - mother nature's sometimes monthly occurrence. I'm never really sure when to expect to get my period, and though I've been getting it every 5 - 8 weeks recently (this time it was 5), still I think my brain is still stuck in 2006 - 2007 mode, when I didn't get it for 16 months and I was diagnosed with PCOS (the link is to the post where I explain what that is and what it means, no point in my doing so again. ;) ) The diagnosis was a relief, but - oddly enough - it coincided with the beginning of a time in my life when I actually started getting my period semi-regularly without using birth control, almost certainly because of a change in my diet and a vast improvement in my level of physical fitness. Still, though it's getting silly after almost 2 years of regularity, it still always comes as a surprise. What does that have to do with anything, though?
Yesterday morning, I woke up in Lexington, VA, and headed over to Stonewall Jackson's house. This is one of many houses where he lived, with the only difference in this one being that he actually owned it. He actually was probably there less than other places in his life. Still, the house is nicely restored and contains entirely period furniture, some of which actually belonged to the Jacksons, and though I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside, still I'm glad I did the little tour, because it wasn't bad. I generally find house tours to be a waste of time - they're usually expensive, often privately run (thus no photos) and small, and just don't interest me as much as bloody battlefields - but all in all, I think it was probably worth the stop. And one thing about it struck me as decidedly odd, though it took me most of the tour to figure out what: I was with a group of 4 or 5 adults and 4 kids, and all but one of the adults and all but one of the kids were girls.
Civil War type things, like gaming and geek type things, attract mostly boys. Talking to Bjorn the nice tour guide at Shiloh, he mentioned that if I was interested in the war I should be a ranger for a summer, because they ALWAYS need women rangers. Indeed, in my experience, a high majority of the women present at any Civil War site are there with their husbands, and if that means there are a lot of women, that's more a sign of the fact that most of the men interested in the war are older, and therefore married. I'm not saying that these women are there against there will - I'm sure many of them are really into it, and many of the others are at least interested - but I also suspect that for many couples it's a compromise, as in, "we'll go to the Civil War museum and I'll behave, and in exchange you'll go to this place that I like, and you'll behave." Thus, to be on a group with so many women, reflecting on the ranger thing, just has me thinking a lot about femininity and such things.
I've never been much of a girl. In elementary school, when all the other girls hit that point where they started talking about boys and wearing makeup (at my school, it was right around the transition into fourth grade) I completely failed to keep up, thought wearing make up was ridiculous (still do except for theater or other cool uses or for covering up something extreme - okay, maybe not ridiculous, but a little silly, anyway ;) ), thought New Kids On the Block were the stupidest thing ever (wow, that dates me...and to make it worse, in true thinks-she's-cooler fashion, I'd never actually heard a song by New Kids...), and couldn't imagine why anyone would want anything to do with boys, all they do is tease you (my frame of reference, after all, was my older brother). And though I started to wear a bra in 6th grade, I was otherwise far behind the curve physically, too. Though I spotted when I was 12, it turned out that this wasn't me getting my first period, it was me breaking my hymen while horse back riding, though I didn't discover that until the time came to lose my virginity and there was no blood, much to the surprise of both of us - but because I thought this was my first period, I never bothered to pay attention after that, so I don't actually know when I did get my first, but it was almost certainly in high school; I can count the number of times I got my period the whole time I was in HS (and probably so could my friends, because I tended to whine shamefully and loudly when it happened), and I didn't get it once my entire freshman year of college.
As I got older, my interests also tended away from girly things. Though I learned to sew when very young, and have maintained that interest, I can't really think of any other stereotypically girl habits I've got. I've never really liked to shop, and have grown to like it less the older I've gotten, and I don't generally get interested in boys. Oh, I might see a guy and think, "he's cute," or even, "he's hot," but that doesn't in anyway lead to an interest in actually messing around with him; I tend to be completely uninterested in physical interaction except in extreme cases (of which only two have arisen in my life, and only one of which has actually led to a relationship). Furthermore, though I've got wide hips, I carry most of my weight in my belly which means I don't have a great waist, and I'm small breasted - I've got a feminine face, but not a great body (my best feature is my legs...) - and thus I've never felt that I look very feminine either (note the careful wording on that - when I think of it objectively, I actually think I look fine; I could stand to lose 15 to 20 pounds, but other than that I'm an attractive woman. My self perception, on the other hand, is a completely different matter).
I've come to know a lot of girl geeks, but when I was younger I only knew one (
claireon) and all my other friends were boys. In MS, there was Cynthia, but again, all boys - and we were brought together more because no one liked any of us than out of common interests. HS was definitely better - and the introduction to a small but devoted group of geeks (ultima_baka and his Magic the Gathering addiction; Adam and his Star Trek - I was already a huge Trekkie by then; Minh and his anime and video games) led me to take up all kinds of new hobbies. Going in to HS, I was already a Trekkie, fantasy reading, Star Wars watching, Beatles loving, Civil War buff. By the time I left high school, under the influence of my friends, I was also a Magic playing, anime watching, video game playing, even bigger Trekkie, having only roleplayed twice but wanting to do so again.However, all of this is just rambling, except that it tends to something that has really been on my mind the last year and change. I feel like I botched an important part of my life the first time around. I was completely burned out my senior year of high school, with the result that when the time came to apply to college, I only sent in 1 application - the one for SUNY, on which you could apply to up to four SUNY schools - and I wrote in Binghamton, Geneseo, Stony Brook, and New Paltz. In order, two of these are good schools, one is average, and one is mediocre; but I didn't care. I did no research and I put in no effort. Come spring, I got acceptances from all four, and trying to pick between Geneseo and Binghamton, I only looked at two factors.
1. Size. Binghamton had about 12,000 students and Geneseo had about 3,000. My experience at Stuy vs. Manhattan East (my middle school) had taught me an important lesson: bigger schools are better because I have a better chance of meeting people like me. After all, I'd had no friends in middle school except those of convenience, and, in 8th grade, the beginnings of a friendship with a 7th grader named Adam, and acquaintance with a girl from my Hebrew School -
claireon (the same Adam I mention above in talking about high school - the only one of those relationships in middle school that really lasted). Granted, some of my experience in Stuy had been luck - of my four good friends there, three were in my homeroom, and the other was Adam - but even so, bigger was clearly better.2. Japanese. My senior year of high school had been a disaster in an important way. The previous summer, an Intel project I had been doing as an internship fell apart completely after barely getting of the ground, and I was struggling with Calculus (actually, I was doing fine in Cal, my grades were great, but I didn't feel good or confident about it) and all of this had meant that in fall I'd decided to give up my dream of becoming an astronomer (certainly a major factor in my burned-out-ness.) The decision not to do an Intel had left a gap in my class schedule, which I had to fill, and got bullied by
ultima_baka in to filling it with Japanese. By the time I had to choose a college, though I was already tentatively leaning towards being a history major, the one thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to continue taking Japanese. Geneseo offered a study abroad program, but only one year of language study. Binghamton, on the other hand, had three years of language. And, I discovered, a student at one SUNY could do the study abroad of any other SUNY school.Thus, the decision was simple: go to Binghamton.
Looking back with 20-20 hindsight, I can see how different my life would have been if I'd put more effort into this decision. For example, I wanted to study early American history (roughly, the Revolution to Reconstruction). A non-burned out me would have found a college that actually had a program in this. Instead, Binghamton only offered one class in this entire time period (Civil War and Reconstruction, which I took and didn't enjoy at all for various reasons). A non-burned out me might have considered that my grades in Cal actually meant something, and not given up on science. Basically, things might have turned out very different if only I'd been more with it in a 6 month period when I was 16 and 17.
(lmao, I've managed to lose track of the very salient and strong point that tied this bit of rambling into the first bit of rambling about femininity...ha!)
I'm not sorry I went to Binghamton. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have met a lot of great people. The experiences I had there, even with the not so great people, helped me to learn a lot about myself and how to interact with others. I was very immature when I got to college, and I left undergrad a much better person, and even better still I think after grad school (though I've been slipping the last couple of years, again for various reasons, most lack of practice in important social skills caused by the small social circle I maintain in NYC). That's not the point. The point is that, looking ahead, I've been trying to figure out which of these cut off avenues still interest me.
(it's really bugging me that I can't remember what my awesome point was...damn it all...this isn't it, but oh well)
I've gotten more girly, not less, since I've gotten older. Some of this was definitely being in a five year relationship; some of it was that I finally finished the physical maturing that most of my peers finished by the time they were 14; some of it was exploring my sexuality when I got a crush on a girl; some of it was getting to wear big flouncy dresses at LARPs and discovering that I liked to both make and wear them; some of it was the romance novels I started reading occasionally in HS. I've always felt, though, that it was a strength rather than a weakness that I was a girl who was drawn to boy-ish topics like history, fantasy and role playing. This has cost me dearly, also (I've long believed that had I been a boy my internship in the summer after 11th grade wouldn't have fallen apart, and again, how different things might be now!) but I wouldn't trade it. And now I'm starting to wonder, should I use it? If there are places that will welcome me into the field I'm interested in precisely because I'm a girl, should I go for it?
But there's the rub! See, in the conversation with Bjorn the tour guide, the painful truth was obvious: girl rangers aren't wanted to talk about bloody battles, troop movements, or generals. Girls are wanted to talk about girl things like female nurses or wives on the battlefield - the things that a wife along at the battlefield might want to hear, while her husband is learning about the blood and guts. A girl reenacter is in the same boat. Life is too short for me to want to waste time learning about things that don't interest me - and I don't have any interest in being shoe horned in to a role.
Ah well. That really wasn't my overall point, but I still can't remember what was, which is incredibly frustrating. I guess really it's just that these are the two things on my mind. It's not that I don't like what I do - I do, and it's lucrative - but I'd still ultimately like to build a career in one of the areas that I've always been passionate about - science and/or history - but I don't want to move forward until I figure out what I really want in that regard. And even then...I still won't be able to do it right, because this time I'll be doing it while holding down a job that keeps me in NYC, which means I'll have to pick a school in the city, and while granted there are some great schools in the five boroughs, it's still a restricted list, the moreso because some of the best (ie, NYU, Columbia) won't be interested in taking an approaching-30 undergrad. And meanwhile, the girl stuff is especially poignant to me right now, too: I'm now less than a week from the 3 year anniversary of my break up (though it depends on how you slice it; the day I went in and said I think we need to break up was April 17th, 2006; I don't know the actual date when we stopped trying to make it work, but it was about 6 weeks later in May; we'd lived apart the whole interim time, though, and though we'd had a handful of dates, there really wasn't much more of a relationship after the 17th, and that's generally been the date in my mind when it was over) and thus I think it's understandable that such things occupy my thoughts.
Of course, my lack of girliness hasn't stopped me from attracting men. Instead, it's meant that I have difficulty being attracted to men, when is an equally if not more thorny problem. At the rate I've exhibited so far, I seem to get a crush ever 5 years (one when I was 18; one when I was 22 or 23) - if this keeps up, the one I get at 28 better work out, because I won't get that many more chances! ;)
My next intended destination after Stonewall's house was Winchester, VA. Winchester seemed to have a small collection of semi-interesting museum type things, and so I headed north. While I was going, though, I passed a name that was vaguely familiar - New Market - and sure enough, there was a battlefield there, and I decided to get off even though I still wasn't feeling well and I was now reaching a critical stage of hungry.
I'm glad I did, if not for the usual reasons. Sure, it was a nice if small battlefield; the reproduction of the farm at the site was quite interesting too, but that wasn't what was fascinating about this battlefield. It also hosted a museum called "The Hall of Valor," and stopping in, it became clear what was different about New Market. The museum and the battlefield site weren't run by the Parks Department; both were owned and operated by the Virginia Military Institute (located in Lexington, and where Jackson used to teach). The result was a truly bizarre, skewed account of history as one would expect when it's being told by a private entity with a stake in the interpretation (not that the government doesn't have a stake, but it's not the same). VMI's goal was simple: make VMI cadets heroes. See, at the battle, of a few companies of cadets participated (250 in all). They were very young (mostly 14 to 17) and many were the sons of prominent Virginians (there's the money and importance part). They clearly played some kind of role in the battle, though I'm loath to try to say what since what I learned about the battle was all filtered through the lens of VMI's stake in retelling it, but they suffered a 20% casualty rate, which is definitely something. But I couldn't help but thinking: what REALLY happened? How important was this, really? This entire complex was an example of public memory gone wrong - not that it wasn't well done, not that it wasn't interesting even aside from this overarching issue - a group determined to see that an event is understood in a particular way which may or may not be aligned with the facts. Indeed, I fear that they did the cadets a grave disservice: because based on what was related, my instincts suggest that the boys actually DID play an important (if not, perhaps, pivotal) role in the battle, but because of the way the whole place was so heavily skewed, I actually became entirely skeptical of that role, whereas a more balanced retelling would have enabled the viewer to deduce for themselves just how critical and heroic these boys were. Of course, that's only from the point of view of me, one over-educated enthusiast with an interest in bias. I can only imagine what the other people there thought.
Oh, and another side effect of the bias? It's the first place I've been - even more than Jackson's house - that I felt a distinct southern bias in the depictions. It made me wonder what the history teachers are telling the kids at VMI...
So while I was pretty not good, I'm still glad that I stopped, and if I didn't wander around as much as I might of, still it was an interesting battlefield. And the museum had a neat collection of late 19th century Civil War art.
From there, I pressed on to Winchester, checked into a hotel, grabbed lunch, grabbed dinner, and sat down to watch the game. It's only four games into the season and everyone is still settling in to their roles, so aside from a little private whining to
ultima_baka about the outcome, I'm actually not concerned. What I will say is that so far, we've played four, and all four have been nail biters (two losses and two wins, but all four hard fought on both sides, close games, and none really decided until the last inning). If the entire season is like this, I don't think I'll make it.I had made some plans to wander around Winchester today, but the weather is foul, and so now I'm not really sure what I'm going to do. ;) However, at least I got this written...though I still can't remember what my awesome, unifying point was...:(
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Date: 2009-04-12 04:31 pm (UTC)W&L's main campus is really pretty and uniform, almost the opposite of I.U with it's different and sprawling buildings. Oh, and some of the stores and restaurants downtown are amazing. Strangely they have one of the best vegetarian places that I've ever been too. They also have some neat gift stores.