no subject

Emerson Cod has a framed print of my grandmother's 1933 Chicago World's Fair poster hanging in his office. I can't even.

My grandmother was born in Chicago in '33, a World's Fair baby, and she's got a tremendous collection of related stuff, but that poster - the one by Glen C. Sheffer, with the lady standing on the globe with her arms outreached - is the one she's always had most prominently on display. In quiet tribute to her, I've used it as an opening object in my science-fiction-topic comp class, and three circular detail-crops top my current syllabus. Suffice it to say that the image is majorly iconic for me and seeing it in this show is blowing my heart to confused sentimental bits.

fooled heart beating so fast

I've spent several hours tonight reading Love, Joy, Feminism, by Libby Anne, a blog by a survivor of Christian Patriarchy, and I'm nowhere near through. I didn't expect to find personal connection when I opened a link to her so much as sociocultural analysis, but there are a number of interesting intersections between her experiences and mine: a child of a family-centered family with a lot of closeness and some major boundary issues, a former funny old-fashioned little girl who liked to sew patchwork and wear Laura Ingalls Wilder dresses (and also couldn't afford entrance to the worlds of mall fashion and pop music that my peers inhabited), someone who essentially "married" her very first boyfriend as a young teen. Not to mention my years of decidedly secular but also decidedly oddball homeschooling and the distrust for mainstream culture my parents raised me to. Opposite ideological bent, but same basic set of doctrines: question them, they're not to be trusted. The family way is Best.

There's a weird balance between liberalism and conservatism in being an outsider, I think; I couldn't have been brought up with more radical politics, and certainly in the eyes of Christian Patriarchalists I have been the worst of sinners, but in other ways I recognize the defensive snobbery of the girl-child who wants to believe that she's better than the other girls because she's industrious and family-oriented instead of crass or materialistic, and I'm not sure it mattered that much that my parents were anti-capitalist intellectuals instead of religious fundamentalists, not in the virtuous outsider social psychology of that sort of thing.

But it's awkward, because I still also do often think that the family ways I was raised to ARE Best, really & truly, and I want to be loyal to them.

Relatedly (?), I guess my Mormon childhood bff and intermittent crush object is also moving back up north. I have ... complex? ... feelings about this.