Just Passing Through

 I've got an idea, since I haven't been very good at updating lately. I'm taking a que from Kerry Bradshaw in Sex and the City where I will write more complex updates over the course of a week, and I'll post once a week, around Friday. This will allow me to explore more complex ideas and write more multi-facted entries, by building on a theme all week long rather than summing things up like a list. I aspire to be a journalist and write articles for the public, so that is why I am going to write more like a journalist on here. :)


Matt Kelley, one of my greatest and most generous teachers passed away on Monday. He contributed to the way I view the world in a big way. He loved photography, retro aesthetic, good movies such as Shaft, and rock n roll.


One way that I think of death, no matter how a person passes or how young, I think that when they die, it is their time to go. It's deeper than that, I believe that when they die their soul is used up, wrung out, like a wet sponge, like when you start crying and then you stop and you don't need to cry anymore, or when the clouds are heavy with moisture and it rains and the clouds are gone. I believe our lives and our souls are the same way, everyone has a capacity. Everyone can only wring out the amount of soul that is in them. Soul's come in different sizes, and some people fulfill their soul capacity quicker, like Matt. I believe he really utilized his soul. But that is just my opinion, let me know if you find it offensive, I would like to be enlightened to another POV.

This is a hard topic to follow up, because it feels like simply dismissing a person's whole life, and I don't want to do that (because he was and always will be an incredible man), but I also want to tell you about the rest of my week.

Yesterday morning I settled into my couch to read Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Their Circle by Lois W. Banner. It is a great book, I am learning so much from Ms. Banner about young women and their culture and lifestyle from the late Victorian era up til the 1920s so far. It's absolutely fascinating, and part of what is fascinating is the fact that social norms really are very fluid because they were so different just 100 years ago!
The culture of Smashing or Crushing, for example, was where girls engaged in semi-romantic (bosom buddies) relationships with each other, and the strange part is that this was not considered homosexuality but a healthy way to keep girls away from boys before marriage!