Muscle Memory (or, the sort of thing I think of that isn't a meme)

[tanaise]

My oldest scientific memory is the discovery of the baby mammoth in the ice. I don't remember when it was, but we were getting a magazine at the time--probably either National Geographic, or the kiddy version, "National Geographic WORLD" and it was full of pictures. It was all very sad to me because they could tell even what it had eaten! and yet it was dead, and hadn't grown up to become a big healthy mammoth and have little fuzzy mammoth babies of its own. The moral of that story was "Don't wander away from mom in a snowstorm or you'll fall into a crevasse and not find you again for thousands and thousands of years."

My oldest political memory is also my oldest memory period, of protesting Regain. We chanted "Ronald Regan, he's no good/send him back to hollywood." When i was little, protesting was like the most fun EVER! We'd take a bus down, way way early in the morning and we'd ride forever, and I'd sleep or possibly annoy people because I was too little to read then. And then we'd get to DC, and I'd ride on my dad's shoulder's in the crowds and we'd yell and walk back and forth, and then after a while, we'd go off to a museum (natural history! with the *proper* hall of minerals), and then get back on the bus and go home.

Comments

[fingle.livejournal.com]

One of my earlier socio-political memories is of laying on the carpet in the living room during the evening news brodacst and seeing the little pictograms that represented how many U.S. troops had died that day in Vietnam versus how many Vietnamese troops had been killed. Each little soldier silhouette represented X number of lives lost... I imagine that we were supposed to be gratified by the fact that the little line of Vietnamese soldiers killed was always longer than the line of little American soldiers...

I often think that pictogram was one of the most inappropriate visual aids ever used in broadcast televison, and has much to do with my lifelong loathing of television in general. The memory still makes my guts twist, particularly when I realize that I nearly made it to eighteen years old in time to be drafted into that war.

Strange days indeed, and here we are again...


Umm, sorry for lighting off like that...