Monday, March 18, 2013

Grab a cardigan and go live life.

Sometimes I forget that I wrote a blog post at 2:00 am, so when I'm about to make a new post a week or so later, it pops up and I need to finish it. This is one of those times. So, enjoy this.

Just yesterday Mary, Julia, and I were saying we wished we were blogging more. I suddenly just developed a list of things to blog about!!
A few weeks ago, Hank Green (of the Vlogbrothers) was visiting the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum on the University of Montana campus. When he posted a video containing a Miss Emily Graslie, the internet fell in love. Nerdfighters everywhere immediately requested more of her, and more we've gotten. She was given a web show of her own, The Brain Scoop, where she has been working with wolves a lot lately.

She, and others!, made this video this week. (CAUTION! It's very gross.) After watching, I began thinking about something very important. What makes animals so different from humans?
I got on Tumblr and asked this question, and she responded so much sooner than I anticipated. It honestly seems a little incomprehensible to me that someone I admire so much read something I wrote, AND responded to it.

I bet you're currently trying to figure out why I admire this lady so much. And also why I tweeted about this ordeal 5 times in 20 minutes, as well as posting about it on Facebook, and am now blogging about it. In all honesty, I'm not sure.

My whole life, I have loved history with a passion. I have only fallen asleep in a history class once (we were watching a really boring video, not my fault) and I'm always at the front of the class paying attention. Because of this, I'm like a walking book of random stories, facts, and trivia that I've absorbed. My mom has been telling me, for several years, that I should go up to our local museum (the Plainsman Museum) and volunteer. Since my mom was telling me to do it, I assumed it would suck, so I never did. I have never regretted that decision more than in the last few weeks!
The first week or two of January, I went in and asked if I could volunteer there. Megan Sharp, aka the slightly older version of me, seemed genuinely excited by this and said I was welcome whenever I wanted to be there. Starting the following Tuesday, I have been there every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and most Fridays since. I'm estimating that I have spent close to 150 hours there in the last three months. This is on top of school, musical practice, and my actual job, but it's been the best 150 hours I can imagine. Obviously, I was born to be in a museum.
I did a little soul searching and decided that this is what I'm meant to do. I NEED to find a way to get paid to be in a museum, cleaning antique bowls, cataloging newspaper articles, researching local families, I need to do this forever. I feel like I am incredibly lucky to have found what I believe to be my life's calling at the ripe, young age of 17.

How does this all tie in with a lady with feather earrings and a scalpel picking away at a rotting wolf's pelt? Emily Graslie feels the same way about zoology and taxidermy as I do about my little museum. She loves it so much that after she graduated with a degree in painting, she went back to school to get a degree to allow her to get paid to work at the museum. That's right, she doesn't get paid to do all of this nifty stuff either. I guess that's why I like her so much. We're floating in alarmingly similar boats. Except hers just went from being a 'me' to being a celebrity in the eyes of Nerdfightaria. Emily and Hank and Michael and everyone else who supports these videos are the reason I even thought of going into Museum Studies! She was kind of the eye-opener that said, "Hey. If you really love it, don't talk yourself out of it. It's not just for old people anymore. Grab your cardigan and go live life!