Growing Up on Film
Right now I’m watching 49 Up which is part of the series Up that began in 1964, filming children at age 7 and then every seven years thereafter.
I love this kind of thing - basically experimenting on children to see how we all grow. And I think I would have loved to be selected for something like this, to see myself grow and change. And yet several of the subjects have said that they don’t like the intrusion into their lives, they wish the filmmaker wouldn’t bring up old painful subjects, and so on. I guess the experience of watching this is very different than the experience of being filmed for it. I do wonder how the children were selected, and at what point they were allowed to give their own consent - probably at age 7 their parents put them in it, but were they told at 14 that they could choose for themselves, or did that not happen until they were 21? Why, if they didn’t like it, have they continued to be in it up to age 49? How many kids were in it originally that have dropped out? Have any of them died? Perhaps I’l learn about this by the end of the movie.
Filed under uncategorized | Comment (0)Socialization
At the moment I am attempting to juggle social plans for Monday. I have the day off work but A does not, so I am planning to get together with a couple of friends. One is for brunch in Rockville and the other is for lunch at Gallaudet; the problem is that they both want to meet at very similar times! So I am trying to move one up a little and the other down a little and hopefully I can do both, because I really like both people and I would hate to have to change plans altogether because of how rarely I socialize.
I really don’t get out much; any of my local friends can tell you that. I am perfectly happy hiding out at home most of the time; I can go for weeks without doing any real-life socialization. (As opposed to online socialization, of which I do plenty.) I have become a shy person - I wasn’t as a child, but nowadays I don’t know what to say to people half the time and I get embarrassed in social situations. I suppose it might be related to the lack of socialization when I was a kid; for much of elementary and middle school I was primarily a scapegoat because I was two years younger than all my classmates and I think my social development got a bit delayed. (A would certainly agree with this.) When I run into situations where I have two things planned at the same time, I get scared and I want to throw up my hands and cancel everything because it’s just too difficult. That’s certainly a combination of social nervousness and my general anxiety disorder.
Eh, I don’t know. This is mostly just personal musing, I guess, that I’m comfortable sharing with readers.
Filed under self | Comment (0)Camp Conowingo
They say that olfactory memories are the strongest kind of memory - that a smell can trigger a memory better than anything else. That’s certainly true of the perfume A bought yesterday, because as soon as I smelled it I was reminded of the Girl Scout camp I attended for several years as a kid.
I was tickled to find that Camp Conowingo has a website now, with photos and tiny movie clips. There is even a picture of the chimney, which was the source of ghost stories when I was a camper. Reportedly a woman who lived in the house during the Civil War had fled when troops were approaching, and she stuffed her baby up into the chimney. The soldiers subsequently lit a fire in the fireplace and…well, it was a rather gruesome story! We insisted that we could still hear the baby wailing, because the chimney was all that remained of the home. The pictures of the dining hall show that it hasn’t changed a bit since I was there! The movie clips are pretty bad; they look like they were taken by a cell phone.
The images of the creek and lake were surprising, though - I could have sworn the lake was much bigger, and the creek was an uncrossable river! I haven’t thought about Camp Conowingo in a long time - that was a fun trip down memory lane.
Filed under memories | Comments (10)
