My hands and feet are both freezing but I can't go put on socks or else my roommate will know I was lying when I said I wasn't cold and I don't want to look like a pansy. I can handle this.
I'm supposed to be writing a short essay in portuguese about one of my passions but all I can think about is the song Passion Play by William Fitzsimmons and the sweatshirt facebook was advertising to me that I really want now (dash it all, facebook, and your sneaky spy cookies). Neither of those are my passion. If I was going to take the easy route I could talk about traveling and living in new places. I have lots of experience and that is definitely a passion of mine.
But when I think about something I love, no matter what, no matter when or where (because living in Provo even when it was a new place basically sucked the joy out of my life for a while), I would say this:
Walking into a bright, white-walled museum gallery. No one else is in it. Just me and the stuff. And maybe I wouldn't gravitate to that gallery on my own. Maybe it's baseball cards, or very contemporary videos, or early modern Catholic icons, or basically anything that's not cubism or impressionism or period clothing or ancient artefacts (my great favorites), but when it is just me and them... Oh. My heart is beating faster just thinking about it.
When it is just me and them I am in them. I am in all of them at once. I am in the bronzes and the arrowheads. I am touching and smelling and tasting all of the textures and shapes and sizes. It is even better when I don't know the artist or understand the purpose. I mean, I enjoy that too. But there is something about museum galleries that my soul loves; it comes out of me and into the gallery and I am so much larger and older and brighter than I am anywhere else. Maybe it's just the lighting and the archive glass. Maybe it's the mystery of everything else. Or the silence. Maybe it's the air conditioning.
A curator I greatly admire told me once that the things in his museum were his life. And I can see how that happens. I think curating is in my blood and my nature, and things are addictive. The collecting aspect of possession is a large part of any small or large investment that I make. I look at things and wonder if I would want to pose with them in Vogue. Everything I wear has to have my name on it. I try to take my own small gallery with me everywhere I go. Earrings. Tissues from Carrefour. Screensavers.
If I wasn't so driven to be a doctor of philosophy you better believe I would have spent the summer trying to bust my way into a museum career. But it wasn't in the cards. Or if it was, I didn't notice. Someday I will either go back to a museum and stay forever or I will get that dream position at a university and build my own gallery. White walls. Archive glass. Humidifiers, if necessary.
Tonight, that's my passion.
Lovely words.
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