Hey e’rybody,
Yeah so where the hell did Dave and Andy go? Hellooooo there don’t disappear on us
I have been wanting to write about this fantastic experience I had last week. Bear with me, it’s nerdy.
I have been working at the museum for a while now, and one would think that by now I would have an idea of my building’s layout, and that I would perhaps become friends with some of the staff members and learn about what they do.
Well that isn’t quite the case. My vague employment status here, coupled with the building’s central purpose of being a storage facility for the museum’s hundreds of thousands of objects and therefore having crazy security, has limited my knowledge of my workplace to an insane degree. However, by some stroke of luck, that all changed last week.
Last Tuesday, I was eating lunch alone on one of the patios outside when a lady came and sat next to me and started talking to me as she ate her lunch. Now I am no longer surprised when people stop to stare at me, as I am sure they don’t know what to make of me—this random girl who has taken up quarters in one of the curatorial offices (my boss is on a trip! For 2 months!) and reads/yells at people over the phone in Spanish (it’s for work, I swear) all day. But this lady actually wanted to know who the hell I was, so I told her. She ended up being very nice—she’s one of the conservators (i.e., object babysitter/restorer/handler) for the collection and has been with the objects since they were housed in New York. Her specialty is the Latin American collection. Just my luck. She offered to take me on a tour of the collection/conservation lab the following day.
Nice conservateur lady picked me up the next morning, took me to collections, and after punching in the secret code, I was in! We took a look at the conservation lab and the objects they were working on at the moment—beautiful pieces for the upcoming horse exhibit—and to the mountmaking studio (badass), and then, on to the 3-story Collections vault/warehouse located deep in the bowels of the building.
Do you guys remember that scene in the Disney classic “Beauty and the Beast”, when Belle goes to the castle library for the first time? Yeah, that’s how I felt when I walked into Collections.
There were 3 huge floors, connected by a central staircase, with endlessly high metal storage cabinets for the objects. They are catalogued by archaeology/ethnography, medium, and region, with random assortments of things like huge totem poles and statues resting in the corners of the bottom floor, from which we entered. She took me to the area where some of the Latin American objects are kept, and we started opening cabinets. Pure joy, man. The variety of objects in the collection was greater than anything I had ever seen. I didn't get a chance to see the gold and precious stone stuff as they have it locked away somewhere else, but I did, however, get a chance to see some incredible textiles and qhipu-the amazing knotted ropes that the Inka used in lieu of a writing system. Needless to say, it was ridiculous and I did not want the tour to end at all. I was so happy that someone finally took note of my lack of knowledge and involvement in other museum activities outside of my little Inka road bubble.
So despite my hazy state of employment, I will continue to work at the museum because I truly love it there, despite being well on my way to poverty. I am currently housesitting and spent most of my weekend walking around in my underwear and watching lifetime movies in the house’s master bedroom, because what else do you do when you have a house to yourself? Don't answer that.
Lastly, I would like to make a suggestion for this blog. There are loads of things I would like to do on the weekends in dc but often I don’t have any way of getting the word out so that interested partiescan join me and I can actually end up doing the things I want because I am in good company. Would it be crazy to list upcoming fun weekend plans and see if anyone in post-williamsburg wants in? example:
- the National Zoo will soon be getting rid of its only hippo, aptly named “Happy” (see; http://www.washingtonpost.com/
- Thao is playing at the Black Cat next Thursday. I know you want to go.
So anyways, let me know what you think. Thanks for reading my rambles. Have a nice dayyyy
2 comments:
Lucia, Mondays are, as some say, "hella" busy for me. (Do people say that?) But, call me anytime, please, and we'll do any number of things, from visiting retiring hippos, seeing Thao, to speaking Spanish on a deserted patio -- while I fail to understand one word of it.
This rad girl I met from U.C. Berkeley says "hella" all the time. It's a big thing out there, in the West.
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