A long time ago, in a land far far away... I loved history. All eras, all civilizations, I loved it. As a kid it was always my favorite subject, and while most kids in my elementary school were checking out Where's Waldo books from the library, I was reading books on the Crusades, or the Civil War, or Ancient Rome, or Samurai... the list goes on and on... I loved museums, about anything really. I still remember my high school AP U.S. History class with Ms. Mulhern being one of the best classes I have ever taken. (And I got a 5!) In college, after a brief stint in the business school I switched to a history major with a business minor, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Dr. Warren, Dr. Carter, and Dr. Petrie stood out as incredible professors and made me feel like I was actually getting something from my education, enriching myself.
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| Occasionally there was too much enriching... |
However, somewhere along the way history and I broke up. Of course it wasn't history's fault, I was shitty to her. I neglected her. I was too busy with other things. I forgot how good she had been too me. I don't know if it's because my graduate school had so much reading, or my job had so much reading, or life had so much reading... but reading for fun had become a chore. And intellectual television made my head hurt. Overtime, I guess life got in the way and history and I just grew apart.
I think that is one of the reasons I am currently so taken with Saga. As soon as I started thinking about how I was going to compose my Viking force something just exploded inside my head. My passion for history just flooded back. All of a sudden I was reading again, and not just blogs (although there was plenty of that) but I was reading peer-reviewed articles like I used to. I actually went to the store and bought books! At first I was just consumed in research about Vikings. In college my concentrations were Asian and Latin American history, because that's what the three amazing professors named above taught. Thus, anything deeper than the bare bones of Viking culture was new and wonderful to me. Then I expanded through the Dark Ages to the Crusades, and basically to the other factions covered in Saga. And from there it has expanded to pretty much anything. I am in love with history again and it feels goooooood!
One of my favorite activities has been going through my cable guide a week at a time and DVRing everything (I mean everything) history related that interests me. I then put the documentaries on while I paint, browse the internet, write in this blog, whatever. It just feels so enriching (there's that word again) to absorb while I am doing other things to help myself. I have found a few gems so far, and it will probably be useful to me (and maybe you as well) to document what I have been watching/ reading. So for now on, whenever I post I will make it a point to comment on what I am watching at the time, and also share any new articles or books I have found particularly entertaining. Might as well start now.
This post's documentary: Barbarians II "The Franks" on H2; 3 out of 5 stars. It was enjoyable and was decently made but didn't have anything that knocked my socks off.
And here is a cool history mystery (I crack myself up) courtesy of Albert:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/swords-inscription-800-year-old-mystery-180956147/?utm_source=facebook.com&no-ist
History has now become one of my lights in this dark time. It's kinda sad that I had lost an important part of me, but I am fortunate that I was able to find it again. So I guess in closing I would say sometimes we forget the things that make us the happiest, but they never go away, they are just waiting to be found again. And, when in doubt, always end with a sweet pun:
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