a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by veen
veen  ·  1706 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 14, 2019

Drove the panda car to my parents last Friday. Got the newer 33 kWh (~150 mi range) version, so I made it there without charging along the way. We spent Saturday visiting the oldest known planetarium in the world. It's old-old: it was under construction when the Declaration of Independence was written. Both my girlfriend and I had visited it once when we were younger, but we both wanted to see it again.

It's still dope. I had forgotten how many things it indicates - besides accurately displaying the positions of our planets, it also tracks sunrise/set, astrological signs, its x/y axes match the seasons, it has a star map, moon phases and it even shows the moonrise and moonset times. All because a Dutch mathematician in a small, quaint place wanted a dope living room that would prove his point.

On Sunday, we drove to another side of the country to visit one of my girlfriend's best friends. She bought a home with her boyfriend in another small, quaint place somewhere south of Rotterdam. And coincidentally they were working on the living room that day. The sight of a poorly lit, chaotic building-site-in-a-room was a familiar one to me - my dad was always working on fixing up our home for as long as I can remember. It dawned on me that my parents were also in their mid/late twenties when they started living together, my dad spending the evenings and weekends improving the home. It also dawned on me that people my age are now buying homes 'n shit.

When we entered they were just closing a hole they accidentally made in the wall the day before. The home was known to have been built originally somewhere in the fifteenth century, so the exposed wall was a hotchpotch of brick types and sizes from centuries upon centuries of care and disrepair.

I don't know what it was precisely - the centuries old stuff, seeing my parents, the normalcy of my SO's friend buying and fixing a home, but I have rarely felt more old than the past few days. Not old in any absolute sense - I turn 26 in three months, so I can't complain. It's more that I've always thought of myself as a young 19 y/o college student. I've held that identity for long enough that it still lingered on, even though my last lecture was well over two years ago. Clearly I'm in a different phase of my life now, but I don't know yet what that will mean for my future, or what that might mean decades or even centuries down the line.





goobster  ·  1706 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    "...it ... tracks sunrise/set, astrological signs, its x/y axes match the seasons, it has a star map, moon phases and it even shows the moonrise and moonset times... because a Dutch mathematician in a small, quaint place wanted a dope living room that would prove his point..."

Dude. Some people's home renovation projects put mine to SHAME. ;-D