Hey, I just discovered that the article from the Charleston Times Courier about the Dudley presentations is online! Click here to see it. Thankfully there ended up not being any tornadoes here last night, but unfortunately some bad storms did a lot of damage in other parts of the country. This morning I've been compiling the bibliography for my upcoming Material Culture paper, which I am quite excited about. I love writing papers (seriously)! I had originally planned to write a paper about floorcloths for that class, but after talking with Dr. Reid and doing some research, it evolved into: "Interpreting Antebellum Slave Culture through Material Culture: A Case Study of Louisiana's Cane River National Heritage Area." No, the new topic has absolutely nothing to do with floorcloths :-) I was thinking about it last night and I wondered how I went from floorcloths to Cane River--and I don't know how it happened exactly, but I think this will be a fun paper to work on. I am excited because I will be submitting said paper to be considered for the upcoming Material Culture Symposium held at the University of Dealware next April. The professors encouraged us to submit our papers for this conference, but I think I'm the only one who enjoys writing papers, so I might be the only applicant from EIU. The best part is that if my paper is accepted, the university will pay for me to go to the conference--hooray! I love free trips.
You may be wondering what the title of this blog entry is talking about. Well, it's kind of a funny story. You see, about two years ago, I ordered an old photo album on e-bay. I was looking for pictures for a project I was working on, and this album had some from the 1930s and 1940s. I didn't know what any of the photos looked like, and I can't even remember where it was sent from. You have to remember that this was back in the day before I had even thought about where I wanted to go to graduate school, and I didn't even know that there was a city named Natchez--I thought it was just the name of a steamboat in New Orleans. Well, when I received the photo album in the mail, the first page had one photograph labeled "Natchez, Mississippi 1941," and then a series of photographs of Abraham Lincoln's tomb in Springfield. I had been to the tomb before, so I recognized that, but I didn't think anything of it, and I didn't know what Natchez was. Well, later on after I ended up in Natchez and decided to go to grad. school in Illinois, I was going back through those photos and saw that random Natchez picture. I also noticed that it was there with a bunch of Lincoln photographs--it's like it was predicting all of the places I would end up! I wondered if the Lincoln's tomb photos meant that I was supposed to go to school in Springfield, which I did consider at one point, but then I ended up not going to the U of I at Springfield and hadn't thought about the photo album for a long time. Well, Mom called today and told me that she was flipping through that photo album, and there are pictures in there from the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site back in the 1940s!!!! I had totally forgotten about those photos--it truly has predicted my future! Forget fortune cookies, the photo album knows everything. Although last night I did get a fortune cookie with my dinner, and it said "Right now there's an energy pushing you in a new direction." The fortune came true in that the energy of tiredness pushed me right to bed after everybody finally left! Now the energy of nervousness about next week's Dudley presentation is going to push me from my apartment to the library to read more microfilm.
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