Overwhelming Thoughts

I haven't written in this blog for quite some time, ever since I started keeping my other, daily blog. But I felt it necessary to write something that's not in poetic or prose form.

What an odd month it has been for me. It doesn't feel like it should be nearing August; I remember ringing in the new year watching The Hang Over as though it had just happened. Sometimes it scares me, how fast time moves by. It seems to creep and slowly slink along when we want it to move the fastest, but as we go about our every day, we suddenly blink and we're another year older. The world has tacked on another 365 (and a quarter) days to the billions that have already been had.

I realize that I get overwhelmed, sometimes, contemplating the past and the future. Not in a personal regard - I've spent too much time analyzing my past and wondering about my future - but in a general sense. I think about all of the people who have lived on this earth, who never dreamed of what we have now. I usually start at more recent times and work my way backwards.

So, for instance, I'll often think about Hollywood in the 1930's and 1940's and how glamorous everyone was. The was a certain air of class and a real sense of posh that surrounded everyone in that time. I think of those glamour shots that are so famous now, with the soft lighting and ethereal glow that seemed to frame everyone's head like a halo. The women looked stoic, but with a hint of mischief in their eyes - or with a hint of sex behind half-closed lids, fanned by long, beautiful eyelashes. I can't quite fathom how the women got their hair to look that way, and I imagine that it's always going to be a mystery to me.

From there, I jump back to the turn of the century. I think about the sinking of the Titanic and how it wasn't just the movie that jumped Leonardo DiCaprio's career. There were real people who were on that real ship, screaming for help in the blackness of the Atlantic. Captain EJ Smith really went down with his ship, his last trip before he was to retire and spend time with his family. That honestly and truly happened.

I often think about the people I see in the old photographs that my grandma has in her hallway. They're mainly of her parents or siblings. Sometimes, I get caught up in just staring at them, wondering what was in their mind at the precise instant that moment was captured on paper. No one looks happy, but I know it was more because of the long exposure time in order to get a picture taken - smiling for six minutes would be ridiculous. And impossible. But still, I wonder if they were hopeful. I wonder if they were thinking about what they were going to cook for dinner, or what they were going to do for work, or whether some golden opportunity was going to find them as they made their new lives in America. I wonder if they were thinking about whether their children would survive - I know my grandma has told me that they lost a few to various diseases when they were very small. I try to imagine them talking, breathing, their voices heavy with an Italian accent they hadn't quite lost - and would never really lose. I try to imagine my grandma as a baby, sitting on her father's knee, smiling up at him as she cooed.

And then it just keeps going. I think about literary London in the 1800's, the time of Marie Antoinette in France, Henry VIII, Galileo and then Inquisition, the Crusades, the Black Plague, the time of Beowulf and Grendel, and then neanderthals. My brain often feels like it's going to explode once I've reached that point, but I like the feeling. I think it's important to remember the past. I think that human nature is to commit the same errors, over and over and over again, so we might as well learn about it so we can try and break the cycle.

I often wonder if anyone else has thoughts like these, or if I'm just the only crazy girl in the world who makes up stories for the people she sees in pictures.