...

"We are forever incomplete, but fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures — we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials — make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be but a fragment is always to strive for something beyond oneself, something transcendent — an unexplored possibility, an unmapped avenue. This striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous — it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors — it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being."-Eric Wilson

Who would have ever thought you could love something so much?

Grown-up purchase #1 (well, #2 I guess if you count my new bedspread):



.... I might have hugged it after my friend Ryan and I finished putting it together. Which process took 2 hours. %$#* IKEA instructions!

It's so beautiful!!!

"I LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!!!!!!" -Mooshu from Mulan

I am alive!

And I am writing to you from the comfort of my newish laptop that seems to be (knock on wood) newly virus free. I wrote a whole angry conspiracy-theory blog three weeks ago about how all computers secretly have it out for me, but as I neared the completion of said rant, my stupid computer froze me out and it was lost. Believe me, if I had published it, you'd have been in agreement- seriously my track record with technology BLOWS.

Computey and I have reconciled in the past two days, though, thanks to Kaspersky Virus Removal tool. And much, MUCH more importantly, I write to you tonight from my very own room, in my very own house!!!!! I haven't lived in a house in 7 years, and of those 7 years, I have always shared a room with various wonderful girls. But as you know from several posts back, I just turned 25. And like family, it was about.... time.

Time to move into a house, be close to the Pentagon City metro stop, and inhabit my own room so that I could study to my grad student heart's content without interruption. And also, just feel like a real adult. Yep, that's what I had decided on May 10th, when I sublet the (shoebox-sized) apartment spot I'd been renting since I first moved out here in January '09. I sublet it with one quick call to a girl at BYU coming out for the summer, and then I started walking up a hill to meet two friends and together sign a lease for the world's most gloriously refurbished townhouse, which we had found earlier that week. Halfway UP that hill, I recieved a call from one of these friends informing me, agitatedly, that our landlord had sold that townhome to someone else half an hour before, and we were officially out of luck. And I was out on the streets.

Thus began an epic 68-day chapter of my life known as "Homelessness." Some of you have heard all about it. Over the last two and a half months I have moved TWELVE times, staying with friends in the area who were gracious and wonderful enough to offer me their spare couch, bed, air mattress, etc, a week or so at a time, so that I might not literally be sharing my bed with the bums out on the street. I held out for the exact contract I wanted (single room, under $600/month, walking distance to metro, cool roommates, HOUSE), and happily, my friend Laney called me a month into my homelessness and let me know that, come July 17th, I could have her roommate's spot. It was a done deal and then i just had to wait out the final 5 weeks. Here is a visual flow chart of my itinerate wanderings up til last Saturday (I am LOVING having a computer to play on, let me tell you!!!):

True, it's a shoebox of a room I live in. BUT it has hardwood floors, windows on TWO sides, a tallish ceiling, and alllllllllllllllll of my stuff in it. It is mine all mine. My couch-surfing stint taught me the life lesson that it is only after you lose something that you truly realize the blessing it was in the first place. The sight of all my stuff, in one place, at my disposal, and four bare walls ripe for the decorating brought tears of gratitude and joy to my eyes that first night. And I am still squealing with delight over each new discovery in this house (today it was the rotating dinner schedule amongst the roommates and TIVO!!!!!!!!!! This place ROCKS!!)

I have absolutely no idea where in this mess my phone charger is (problem.), and it took me a solid 20 minutes to find my curling iron on Sunday.... and I have yet to buy a chest of drawers or a desk or shelves, which means that this whole living out of boxes thing is just gonna keep on going until I can locate and purchase such items. I am looking forward to the challenge, though, and the joy of DECORATING my little corner room had me totally unable to concentrate at work today. Look out world, I am about to be CRAFTY! Jayci Judd, you are going to be so proud of me. I am even planning to sew my own curtains! I took my first step today, retiring my wonderful stripey Target bedspread that I bought when I was 17, and purchasing a grown-up down-filled luxury number (for super cheap at Marshall's. My mom raised me well). My ultimate design scheme revolves around the following palatte:

Cornflower blue, Sunshiney Yellow, Silvery Grey, White and Black accents.

I am also hoping to add a touch of shiney, classy Emerald green if I can locate a suitable accent piece or material (pictured below is Kiera Knightly in Atonement; apparently this emerald dress beat out Scarlett O'Hara's scarlet ensemble to win best movie dress of all time, which I think is total bunk.)

I can't wait to begin! If you have any thoughts or websites or product suggestions, please, Please, PLEASE send them my way, I am absolutely clueless when it comes to decorating and design. I've looked at the coco+kelley blog (thanks Maggie), and boo, they don't seem to sell too much stuff. So I have to do this on my own. My visiting teachers and I have a trip to IKEA planned for Saturday... but I am kind of a whiney purist and want to stay away from their mass-produced trendy items as much as possible. What color should I paint the walls? It's a small, well-lit room that I don't want to feel any smaller. Hee hee hee...

GASP! Look at this couch! Anthropologie.com, why must you do everything so perfectly!?!?! You're like the Marion Cotillard of decorating. Everything I want to do and be, you have already been and done, flawlessly. Be French. Sing like Edith Piaf. Kiss Russell Crowe. Be some dream-hacker's haunting and stunning lover/muse (INCEPTION WAS AMAZING!)

K that's enough for now. Lindsey, signing out, and falling asleep in her little haven.

I'm in the New York TIMES!!!!

In a round-about way of course. :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/us/08hoover.html?ref=us

Wednesday, my museum held a press conference in a top-floor room at the super chic Pew Charitable Trust building in Penn Quarter (looked like the one at right but much bigger, and two of the walls were solid glass, looking out over the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building and the National Archives). We four troopers who are stationed out at the NLEM's offsite storage facility had been preparing for this conference for about two weeks, selecting objects from the collection to display to reporters, and listening to/critiquing my boss as she practiced her speech.

The press conference was held to announce that the museum has acquired the estate of J. Edgar Hoover, who, in case you didn't know, is a BIG FREAKING DEAL. He was the Director of the FBI since it became the FBI (1924) all the way til 1972. Aka 48 years as the head of the nation's premiere crime fighting institution! John Dillinger and the other machine-gun slinging gangsters of the 20s? He cut his teeth on their arrests. WWII spies? He was all over them. Communists? He had them shaking in their boots. We at the museum have received everything in his home at his death and more, including his papers, photos, china, uniforms, and a crazy assortment of awards and curios presented to him by rich, famous, powerful, and grateful people all over the world (hundreds of items!!).

Please note how the article mentions the archival needs of the collection. That's ME who is fixing all that right now, as the graduate archival intern (We have a very small staff). Also note where it says, "Ms. Baty and other museum staff members are creating an inventory of all the items. The team has counted about 2,500 items, and Ms. Baty said there may be more than 4,000 items when all is said and done." Other Museum Staff Members = Me and the other intern, Elena. My friend Marissa of course read the article after I had posted it to my Gchat, and she remarked that the article made it sound like there were 20 of us hustling through this process. Nope. A total of four of us. :) I love my job, I'm getting to do so many things way above my pay grade! Oh, and the picture in the article? The photo of Hoover is cropped because my gloved hands are holding up the sides of that frame. I'm SO enjoying the closest I'll get to museum fame right now.

My workweek awesomeness didn't stop there: the next day, we four squealed to see our release written about in the NYTIMES, the Washington Post, the Washington Examiner, several notable law enforcement blogs and newspapers, and many other smaller interest group websites. So cool.

And after that (and after a free lunch at 5 Guys), Laurie introduced me to the historian at the FBI and he invited me to come visit him at FBI headquarters and do a little "shopping" in the FBI's Hoover files, to look and see if there's anything they have that I would like copies of for my archives.

I'm going shopping through the former Director of the FBI's official FBI files in a week and a half. Hehehehe. I'm so excited, I have ALWAYS wanted to go into the beautiful Hoover building. It's so striking (Brutalistic architecture- some people love to lambast it but I think it's very appropriate for its purpose and setting). Plus I just want to know what the freak is going down in there! So mysterious, so imposing. And so closed to visitors since last year. Hehehe but I'm going in!

K it is late and night and I've got to go. Sorry for the lack of posts lately; my computer unfortunately contracted a virus so I can only write when borrowing a machine, like now.

Vacation's All I Ever Wanted

So this will be brief.

My name is Lindsey, and I am going camping in five minutes. My sister Wee is awesome.

mY name is Wee i get 5 sentensces, i tired cause i wokeded up at 630 to write words. I ate a brownie. it was delectablej. I think my family is the best because we are cool and prety. Also, im in love with alex/twitch but ynni got to hug him, shes great ttoo.

Click me! Wee and Ynny Know You Wont Regret It- It's Alex and Twitch's SICK AWESOME hip-hop routine on So You Think You Can Dance, "Get Outta Yo Mind."

Objectivity

Today I was just shuffling through large object boxes in the NLEM storage facility where I am currently working (aka the “police treasure trove”!). I’ve handled some really cool stuff since I’ve been here: a piece of the World Trade Center, delicate and beautiful arrest warrants from the early 19^th century, rows of police badges from seemingly every precinct in America… but nothing really prepared me for what I saw as I took the lid off of Box #7 this afternoon: a crimson red Ku Klux Klan mask, made of a stiff linen fabric and obviously sewn on a home sewing machine. The small, neat hemlines told me it had been made with care, probably even with pride. The mask was just lying there, benignly, on top of a layer of special Japanese unbuffered tissue paper. Beneath it were two sets of KKK robes: one crimson, one white, both similarly swaddled for preservation purposes.(I really didn't feel like putting up illustrations of this object, so here's a link to the Google image results for KKK mask if you really need visuals.)

Now, normally I’m not an object-based girl. I don’t get the thrills my coworkers get from handling and inspecting museum treasures gingerly with their gloved hands. I get distracted with wishing that I had a real reason to don that sheriff’s Stetson hat, or swing that wooden noise-maker-looking thing around (my boss explains it’s a “police rattle,” which they used before sirens to get the attention of crowds, mid 19^th century. I guess they are VERY LOUD, but ours is brittle, and therefore no one will ever use it to make a sound again…. boo). I’m glad I guess that I work mostly with archival materials, because with documents, I have the chance to use my objects to their fullest extent! I get information out of them, exactly like their original users did! And I get info not only from the written words; as an archivist, I learn things from the handwriting, the date, the paper, the seal, the stamp, the enclosures, etc.

Back to today. I finally experienced a real, visceral reaction to an object, one that was surprisingly strong, and unpleasant. The white of the paper showed eerily through the gaping holes where the eyes—the morally blinded eyes of its owner— would have peeked out. I did not not want to touch it, or even continue to look at it for very long (and I DEFINITELY had no desire to put it on). I just wanted to put it away. It was a very vivid experience, different from all other times I’ve seen KKK masks, in movies or plays (like Genna’s The Foreigner at BYU! That was good times.) No doubt it was my prior knowledge of the lawlessness, the horror, and yes, even the conspiratorial drama that the men who wore this kind of thing effected that was affecting me (Nice English there, no? :).

I couldn’t put it away quickly like I wanted, I had to fill out a condition report first. But I breezed through that pretty quickly, picking the object up by the corners of the tissue paper, seriously almost holding my breath the whole time. It’s still weird to me that something so simple, so obviously homemade, could affect me like that. I told me boss it made me a little sick. She explained that it was donated by an FBI field agent who had been on the case of the KKK during the Civil Rights Era. Fairly good backstory, right?

We had a whole debate at lunch about whether or not we as museum professionals would treat this object differently (aka refuse it) if it had been offered to us by, say, its original owner. Technically, we shouldn’t (treat it much differently). We have to look at things from a broader perspective. The object is most assuredly an interesting addition to our collection, which has the stated aim of creating “a greater understanding of the law enforcement profession and the critical role it plays in American society” through all of its accessions (all the new objects it collects).

The last few weeks, though… well, this whole first year of graduate school, actually, have taught me that I am really bad at this kind of thing- suspending my personal beliefs and reactions in order to adhere to a higher set of standards or beliefs that all fall under the category "objectivity." I have an intellectual temper like no other. You start telling me an opinion or belief that I can’t agree with, I tune you out, or worse, get angry. Obviously, this is a major flaw I get to work on! (Must learn to be more encyclopedic in scope, more benevolent in judgment, and/or more able to patiently listen to opposing viewpoints and then craft and deliver a succinct defense of whatever I think is the real truth! Someday… I'll be good.)

How would the meaning of that mask change if it had been given to us by a Klansman who wanted it to be “immortalized” in the collection? By taking it from an agent, haven't we accomplished that already, in a certain way? Eventually, my colleagues and I came to a tenuous and sticky conclusion that where it came from doesn’t change the object’s value to the museum itself. This sticky consensus is very emblematic of the type of ethics-laden questions curators and museum directors have to deal with all the time. It’s part of the job. As museum professionals, we’ll take this historical object, iron it, pack it in tissue paper, store it in a long line of textiles,and use it to tell the story, to tell the truth, about an important and horrific vigilante movement in the American South. (Ironically, Box #7 sits in between boxes containing bullet-proof vests and the uniforms of Lucius Amerson, the first black sheriff in the South since the Reconstruction). In my final analysis, the ideas that this mask and robe may evoke, the story of American law enforcement that it helps tell, gives us is its final value. We do NOT value it for its original function.

That is my favorite part of being a museum professional. Finding things that open up my and others’ eyes a little more and ask us to push back. All this in order to make us realize that we are a part of the history that came before us, even (or rather, especially) the history that makes us sick and challenges us to leave a better legacy than others have done. Such is the glory of objects.

I still hate that mask though.

Back to the secret files of J. Edgar Hoover… I love my job.

the turn. oh help.

FACT: I turn 25 in 20 days.

<- Normally I look like this on my birthdays. This is not a stance I adopted in a huff after graduating BYU unmarried, no. I can actually remember during the Young Women's entrance interview at age 12 looking up at my bishop with tears in my eyes and anguish filling my little voice as I whispered, "I don't want to grow up." My poor terrified tween soul. Like Peter Pan, I have never, ever heard a convincing argument for the act of growing up. It's just never appealed to me. Two months ago, I won't lie, tears filled my eyes again the first time I said the words "I'm almost 25" to my dad (the "5" part kind of died in my throat, that's how hard it was to say). But I've had a lot of time to contemplate life recently, couch surfing as I have been for one entire month now.

I have three things to say.

To my year 24: You were full of surprises, thank you so much. From day one, when best friend Jessica-Brothers-newly-Clayton sprinted through the SLC airport at 6 am to hug me at my gate, to the sunshine-soaked stint as a lifeguard in the woods, to the unforgettable night I was played Thrice's The Weight, you drove me to my knees, answered my prayers, and made me smile in ways I did not expect. I've gone on the very most and the very least romantic dates of my entire 9-year dating career this year. I've experienced record-setting snowpocalypses (two of them!). I'll not soon forget the triumph of that day-after-finals email from my professor a month ago, congratulating me on a successful final paper argument and admitting that he did not think I could pull off, given my sub-par midterm presentation. (BOOYAH.) I really appreciate the new friendship that was born on the upper deck of an Outer Banks mansion a few weeks ago, as HH and I discussed life and watched the moon rise. Kindred spirits are sprinkled out across every phase of life I think. Hallelujah!

To the next three weeks: Not much you can dish out can beat this weekend's awesomeness. You've got your work cut out for you. But I still believe you will be as great as the rest of 24.



Adam the lion defends us at the Law Officers Memorial Wall



We instigate a new yoga program in the middle of the Natural History Museum (Seen here: Downward dog and "The Splay-legged Giraffe")



God handed me a belt on the Mall, because I needed it. Here's to looking at life through Pollyanna eyes!



To year 25: you're a nice, well-rounded, silvery number. Bring it.

And I have Otis McIntire to thank for it...

It's Friday. Not just any Friday, but THE Friday. The first day in about the last 45 that I haven't had to wake up before my time and do necessary and pressing things every hour of the day until I drop into bed ("Honey tell me the truth: are you having to schedule in an hour a day where you can think?")

So why did my soul still feel the red-brown color of a hundred-year-old barfed-on Oriental rug today? (FYI my soul does not turn blue when sad. It turns murky vermilion.*)

I have the memory of squealing through Robin Hood last weekend to keep me warm.

I have sunshine to revel in, snowpocalypse blues being a thing of the past.

I have the anticipation of beating my racquetball partner soundly this afternoon and attending my first-ever Nats home game tonight.

I even had my favorite Iranian falafel sandwich by the C & O canal to turn up the corners of my mouth.



Still I spent most of today fighting the urge to take a hammer to or stuff a stick of dynamite in... something. BUT! I'm just writing right now to say that I think I'm over the worst of it. Guess why.

Sometimes, when sandwiches, friends, hopes, heat, sports, and Glee can't do it........ a big, possibly homeless, black guy comes around the corner of the canal in Georgetown wearing a bright pink, smiling, styrofoam cartoon whale on his head. No I am serious. The pink whale clashed horrifically with his artfully argyled jeans and baggy hoodie. I have no idea who he was, or why, WHY on earth he chose to wear the world's largest sea mammal on his noggin. But I'm pretty certain that this brave and potentially unhinged soul, who passed by me just as I felt my murky mood couldn't sink much deeper, tipped the scales. Life is still worth living. :)

GO NATS!

*When deliriously happy, my soul turns into a Jackson-Pollock-esque splattering of emerald green, royal blue, and bright yellow.

An open letter to a little sister who went to school with a hole in her pants.

Honey,

When I went over to visit a boy a few weeks ago, it was raining, and as I followed him down his hardwood stairs, I slipped on my damp Chucks and fell-- bump, bump, bump-- on my tail bone down three hard-as-rock stairs. It hurt soooo much but I just popped right off and started to laugh. He did not join me in laughing, which was weird. I give people FULL permission to laugh when I lose my balance, which happens often.

Later, I was biking with the same guy, who was wearing me down stamina-wise (22 miles! MY BUTT!!!). Just after making the swaggerish claim, "I could kick your trash in swimming!" to try and save face... I took a tree branch straight to the face. Didn't EEEEEVEN see it coming.

Then, there was the time I fell down the escalator at the Suncoast Casino in front of Sam F., my junior year super-crush. Or the time I seriously sprained my ankle falling off a sidewalk (again, in the middle of a date, and there might have been swearing involved). I also ran into a pole at twilight in Paris. So (un)romantic.

How about when I opened an umbrella in someone's face and caused their lip to split open (on a blind date to a Jazz game in SLC)? Remember when I had to ride down Snowbird mountain in a toboggan at the end of the day and my friends thought I was dead, when really it was because my legs were so shot that I literally would have collapsed on the snow if I had had to snowplow six more feet?

Once, I came home from doing baptisms at the Provo temple and was standing in a ring of friends, just chatting, when I sort-of fidgeted my foot around in one of my shoes (they were borrowed, beautiful ankle-strappers, courtesy of the lovely Katie Worsley), when my ankle just suddenly tweaked downward off the shoe and I collapsed in a heap. In front of the ward hottie, who just stared at me and mimed catching me, even though he obviously couldn't have (my descent was too quick for him and his gallantry!)

And then, there was the granddaddy of all Lindsey-is-retarded moments, when I closed my eyes for a second to pant while on a treadmill in the Provo 24-Hour... and opened them in time to feel myself at the very edge of the belt, and then got shot backwards across the room onto my back! Undeterred, I hopped right back on the treadmill, having forgotten that it was still spinning around at a decent running pace of 6 mph. In quick succession, the spinning belt knocked my extended foot out from under me, caused me to crash to my knees on the treadmill belt (skinning both of them), and then shot me, again, off the back of the treadmill, roughing up my shins on the back cylinder as I passed by. I clambered up, still undeterred (the iPod blaring high-energy Beyonce helped block the pain). I reached around to turn the speed knob DOWN this time, and about 5 seconds later, I snuck a glance at the line of treadmills to see if anyone had noticed. At least FIVE runners had STOPPED their treadmills and were staring, mouths open, at me; the guy directly to my left mouthed, "ARE YOU OK??" incredulously, to which I just breathlessly replied, "Yea! Whew! I'm fine!" Then I turned around to face the tv monitors again.... and tried in vain to ignore the shooting pains of sweat seeping into the open wounds on my knees and shins.

If you would like more stories like that, I have them. Or if you have favorites I've missed, please remind me :)

Never let it phase you, and enjoy laughing at yourself. It's good to be a clown.

Love,
Ynny

Gossip and Lasting Sacrifice

I absolutely loved my friend M.C.'s post last week, right here. If you're too lazy to click it and read (although you should, she's a great writer), I'll tell you what I got out of it: 1. Benjamin Franklin, if you read his autobiography, was a completely brilliant, stuck-up #$$, and 2. more importantly, there is a great deal of value in being real while simultaneously being positive. Don't wait til something awesome and news-worthy happens to write a blog, basically.

I'd been thinking about the idea of being real and forthright right before M.C. published her eloquent thoughts. Someone called to my attention the fact that I put a lot of my idealism, my super-awesome museum/art blather up here, with very little.... gossip, for lack of a better word, about myself, to balance it out. :) Do you concur?

So I thought of a bunch of stuff to write and confess on this blog to make up for that imbalance... but I don't want to overwhelm all 8 of you, so I'll start with this: I think I've been watching too much Glee.

Juicy, I know!

Haha. There are several wicked awesome real-life stories that that little revelation entails, for more info, see me (one of the perks of being my friend, not just my blog reader). But I would just like to point out that I really deserve a little Glee this week especially. It's Police Week, the week when they place the names of 194 men and women killed in the line of duty in 2009 on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial's walls. They bring in the grieving families and coworkers of the fallen officers to see their names. They treat them like royalty-- motorcade escorts, trained support counselors, camps for the children, etc-- in an attempt to help them through the monstrous task of mourning and learning to live again (cheesy as that sounds... you'd understand if you were here). This week, 20,000 people will pass by the memorial to lay flowers, mementos, pictures, sometimes guitars, toe shoes, car doors, and coffee cups-- any and everything-- at the wall, in memory of their friend or loved one. Often times they just stand and stare, or cry. Or laugh (my favorite).

This week my job has been to talk to the families at the wall, make sure they have paper so they can do a rubbing of their loved ones' name, give them tape to stick their little mementos on the wall, hand them tissues, and just listen. It's been three days, and I already feel like I have attended one hundred funerals. Here at the wall, I have been brought nearly to tears at least 6 times already as I contemplate the ultimate sacrifices that these people, who are often very simple, humble, and funny, are ready to make. They really and truly accept and live amazing principles like valor and sacrifice. And they're so nonchalant about it. I randomly hear stuff like this all the time, "Well, in my third shoot-out, I realized this was a suicide-by-cop scenario, so I let down my gun and got behind the car..." and the more I speak to the police officers, the more I realize that they are just about the last people on earth who take seriously the cause of protecting people. They are some of the last and greatest people I know of. They stand and stare down what can only be classified as pure evil on a daily basis.

I've heard horrific things in three days' times (three to go). I've seen the numbness on the faces of those who are here for the first time, here for one tragic, horrible reason: a spouse, a father, a work partner, has been shot/stabbed/crashed their car while responding to an emergency call, etc. Their emotions are written all over their face, their powerful grief and love and ideals hang in the air around the memorial. Bagpipes go off, big women sing Amazing Grace, brass bands play, and flag guards and solemn processions abound.

I think they deserve a lot of Glee. After work yesterday I went to Zumba to shake it off, then I visited my very favorite pregnant friend, to laugh and remind myself of the flip side of life, all that is good and positive, all the things that my new friends at the wall so valiantly serve and protect.

Yep. I watch a little too much Glee. It, along with cookies and flowers and long showers and kind friends who let me sleep on their floor and late nights of laughter, make my life. Thank heavens!!!

"In valor there is hope."
—Tacitus

"The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are as bold as a lion."
—Proverbs 28:1

Ps I'm taking my camera with me to the wall today. You'll see pics of this awesome place soon.
Pps I realize that my supposedly juicy post turned into another idealistic one, but I don't care. That's WHO I AM! (One of Glee's most favorite things to tout: Being who you are. Got it.)
Ppps Update: Day four was a little more family reunion, a little less tragedy, yay. I got assigned to the jewelry counter at the retail store (someone must have noted my face after my shift yesterday :). Christensens, you'd be so proud. I must have sold well over $4,000 worth of goods today. Not bad when the average price of my inventory is around $40!
Pppps. Rest in Peace, handsome Detective Ridley, age 23, from the Bronx. Your mother is so proud of you. She told me all about your last act.

Yep :)

On being teleological

Teleology–noun. Philosophy.

1. the doctrine that final causes exist.

2. the study of the evidences of design or purpose in nature.

3. the belief that purpose and design are a part of or are apparent in nature.

4. (in vitalist philosophy) the doctrine that phenomena are guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move toward certain goals of self-realization.

I first came across the word "teleological" last semester in my aesthetics philosophy class of DEATH, and it was one of the few words, besides Logos, that really warmed my soul whenever I read it, after I first figured out what it meant (as opposed to deconstructivism, which still just makes my soul feel like a tired, sad little raisin every time I see it).

In case the above dictionary.com definition doesn't do it for you, here's the Lindsey watered-down version: when you describe anything as teleological, you are recognizing that it has a purpose, and that it is en route to achieving its final destiny. You say something is teleological when you believe you see it mid-journey, whizzing towards some ultimate (hopeful) awesomeness. You go hiking in the woods and see the world's most amazing sunset and are moved to exclaim, "What a teleological phenomenon!" because you feel that this sunset is not only following its regularly scheduled scientific retirement into night, but it is also kindly fulfilling its God-given mini-purpose of letting you know that He loves you, specifically, in that moment (and also letting you know that He loves beauty and His whole earth, too).


The reason I was thinking about teleology today is because I fully embrace the idea that nature, people, time itself, and everything that surrounds me has a final purpose in the grand scheme of things. Up until this week, I myself was teleologically barrelling towards my finals and the successful close of my first year of grad school. All my thoughts, time, and most of my emotions were wrapped up in securing myself some good grades and in really doing the world a solid by giving it 29 pages worth of my bebe thoughts about Frederic Edwin Church's 1865 painting, Aurora Borealis, left.


And now, there is no endpoint. I feel a little empty. A little deconstructed even (NOOOOO!!!!). I came home Thursday after 1.5 hours of sleep in the past 48, having just handed in my last paper, and what did I do? I cracked open a textbook. I hadn't really gotten to peruse it this semester, and I was mocked considerably when caught.

Just call me Hermione. On finals week crack.

So, the big question is, am I teleological anymore, now that the gauntlet has been successful run? I sincerely hope so. I can't stand the thought of sitting still, or just meandering around aimlessly. I have an internship, yes, and I will learn a lot therein... but nothing quite gives you the same sense of heady direction as a semester's curriculum to be learned (except maybe the act of dating someone... haha :).

As I pondered this favorite word of mine, snapshots of select modern artworks began to crop up in my mind's eye. This seems perfectly reasonable, in retrospect: no longer commissioned by kings or the privileged class, no longer able to act as the world's source for visual stimulus (that role has been usurped by youtube and modern advertisements), modern art, as opposed to the art of centuries past, simply screams out, in its very un-understandableness (un-understandability?) for you to help define its end point, its purpose. I AM A MONOCHROMATIC CANVAS WITH SLASHES IN IT! DEFINE ME! (Google Image search Lucio Fontana for more of that sort...)

I can think of no better, more... calming adjective for this work, Condensation Cube, 1963-2008, than teleological:



It was one of my favorites to visit when I worked at the Hirshhorn. What you see is pretty much what I saw: a clear plastic cube that comes up to the middle of your thigh, it has about an inch and a half of supremely clear distilled water in the bottom and an ever-varied pattern of condensation droplets streaking the sides, which changes depending on the time of day and the season (although in my experience, these streaks were almost always grouped into the corner of the cube that was nearest the window. Methinks this photographer cheated to get this all-over condensation look). Despite its simplicity, it is a work that really stops people in their tracks, and I think that is because they sense immediately that it is making bare its own destiny, its own journey. Behold! I am a never-ending variation on the theme of water condensation!

As you look at it, you are caught up in the simple patterns, imagining what it would look like if the whole thing were covered in drops. Or you stare closely at it, trying to see if you can spot any drops rolling down the sides. Or you are wondering what would happen and what the cube would ultimately look like if you gave it a giant shove down the escalator... :) By making itself so plain, by revealing over and over again the trick that will continue to be its reason for creation and also its reason for continual adoration by visitors and curators, Condensation Cube, 1963-2008 is a really (dare I say it?) beautiful example of the simple idea of teleology, as it always is, in action.