that saturday feeling all week long

christinefriar:

My parents had me when they were 30. Relatively young. So I went on a kind of journey with them that my sister (8 years younger than me) didn’t get to go on. I was born when they were still living in their first house, moved with them to a second house that they got to build, and then finally to a third, bigger house, when my dad got a job in New York.

Our first house was furnished mainly with yard sale items my mother had bought from a Navy retiree in Niantic, Connecticut when she’d graduated from college and a smattering of stuff they’d gotten as wedding presents, but there was always this one Cassatt print in the hallway to our garage. It was big, probably close to how big the original painting is, which only emphasized that it was a printed poster of a painting, but she framed it in a gold frame and had it hanging proudly near the doorway. Something French before you go. Something French when you get home.

Second house, we bought some new stuff. New baby came, even more new stuff. But this print stuck around. Meaty, pink toddler arms and a pair of legs in repose that don’t quite look right.

In the final house, the house my dad still lives in now, it didn’t stay on a wall for long. I’m not really sure when the editorial decision was made, but it was retired to the basement without my even noticing it was gone. It wasn’t til a couple months ago, when I was rifling through a stack of frames in the hopes of finding some to steal for my own apartment, that I stumbled across the print and realized I hadn’t thought about it in years.

That’s still a very new sensation to me, one I’ve only been able to have three or four times yet in my relatively-new adult life: coming across something that feels instantly familiar and intimate, but that I wouldn’t have ever known how to access in my own brain without the visual prompt.

Without stumbling across the print, I probably could’ve gone the rest of my life without organically thinking of this painting. But with the visual, suddenly I have entire stories to tell. Here I am at three, in Stratford, Connecticut, watching my cousin Jim break the head of a baby doll on the tiled hallway floor during an Easter party. Here I am at ten, in a snow suit in Monroe, Connecticut, on the phone with my friend Lauren trying to nail down which sledding hill is best (it’s the one at the public golf course).

And now here I am at twenty five, coming across a jpeg of a print of a Cassatt on my dashboard and deleting the NPR article that accompanied the image so I can circle around how weird it is to have a connection to something you know nothing about. I’ve never seen this painting in person. I don’t know anything about Mary Cassatt or Impressionism. But these two babies are woven very tightly into the DNA coil of my childhood and that’s kind of astounding.

[nprfreshair]

When I was a child, my parents put a tiny (like 5” x 8”) print of this painting in my bedroom. I’m pretty sure they bought it on a trip to the National Gallery of Art in 1989.

Somehow I grew up believing that the children were playing on the North Sea coast, near Bremerhaven, where I was born.* I think because they were wearing so much clothing (why else would you wear shoes and a hat at the beach?), and I figured the North Sea was cold, maybe not as cold as the North Pole, but colder than the Jersey Shore or the Outer Banks, which were the beaches I knew as a child. 

*Four weeks after I was born, we left Bremerhaven, never to return. It’s the only place I’ve lived that I don’t remember at all.

These are my interests, according to Google. Except for “phone service providers,” they are not wrong. 

If you’re logged into Google, you can click through the image to see your own interests! If anyone else is a secret lover of reggaeton, please don’t be afraid to share.

bless the New York Times headline editor

beyoncearthistory:

Artemisia Gentileschi, “Judith Slaying Holofernes”/Destiny’s Child, “Independent Women”

Yes

Yes

Oh my god yes

A thousand times yes

humania-anatomia:

Took a test on this today!

I miss the days when playing with colored pens could legitimately be considered “studying,” though I never had the patience or the steady hand to be this good at it.

(via scientificillustration)

SUMMER VACATION

PS we will literally be going from Oslo to Sweden

mediterraneum:

Ottoman astronomers studying the moon and the stars in a miniature. 17th century. Istanbul University Library.

(via scientificillustration)