Will Posterity Care if you Were Portly?

Even though I have started to fill my days with history reading I can't shake the feeling that occasionally enters my brain like a nervous tick; I feel excessively rotund. Now this is not going to be the start of a weight loss blog, but rather a rumination on why those thoughts fill up so much of my head cavity.

Rarely have I wondered when thinking about a historical female subject whether or not that person had a healthy BMI. But so much of my own thought revolves around how fiercely the moon is pulling me down to earth. But it isn't just me. So many conversations that I have had with girlfriends, female relatives, strangers on the street devolves into a dirge to how fatty a certain food is, how much weight so and so has gained, and what diet plan works or does not work.

Were our great-great grandmothers secretly obsessed with how closely they adhered to the physical norm that existed in their own minds? And how will the incessant calorie, fat and carb counting of our own lives translate to the pages of history? Is it something that will be captured in an archive? Even if it is, will any scholar think it important?

What archive could reconstruct the hours of time spent staring at a screen..

Starting my reading list for my impending A exams and getting my website back up and running has made me realize that I spend an awful lot of time staring ahead, completely immobile, my mind far away. As I think about my plan of attack on getting to the archives in the Netherlands, I wonder about what moments of my own life will actually leave a footprint. Will a developer inadvertently stumble on my long forgotten grave causing a flurry of scholars to descend and rifle through my bones spitting theories about why I decided to be buried with a fabulous necklace wrapped around my waist? Will my social security number be all that survives (gasp, horror, that's like something out of an Orwellian nightmare), or perhaps my trash? How will future generations write the hours, years, decades of inert time sitting in front of books, computers or TVs? Will it be a pillar to the ultimate cruelty? When noxious ships pulled into New York Harbor three hundred years ago New Yorkers complained of the stench but not of the injustice of the people cramped inside.

Will another someday write that while millions lived on $1-2 dollars a day struggling to find clean water or to dodge ethnic cleansing or religious persecution, an army of others sat and stared blankly ahead at a binary code of bright colors.

Struggling, struggling, struggling

After much struggling I have finally gotten this blog up and linking back to my site. Who knew it was soo tricky?