intergenerational friendship magic!
A colleague from my last job and city visited me in Baltimore last week and we met at Glenstone Museum, a privately-owned contemporary art museum in Potomac.
I am not a contemporary art person. Abstraction is often not that interesting to me, especially in a single piece outside a body of work that might give it context. This was probably the most transformative contemporary museum experience I have had. The experiential parts of the museum were what set it apart - the weight and closing mechanisms of doors, the ease of ordering food (tips included), the space between exhibits for decompression. Instead of guards, each space has guides with more information about the pieces, artists, and context. My friend asked them questions like "If I were to touch this, what would it feel like?" It's also free to the public.
I spent some time in the gift shop looking at Jenny Holzer's merch (I mean really! It's merch) before my friend arrived, and bought the hat that says "learn to trust your own eyes" and this little yellow reminder of "protect me from what I want" that I put over my desktop.
Their website is beautiful and simple and their artists page has a lovely alphabetic menu that's very satisfying to scroll down.
I missed my friend. She retired weeks after I left, and we worked with the same people in a caring profession. We talked about what it's like to leave the heaviness of that work to other things and how we are planning to be of service at this stage in our lives. She is thirty years my senior, but we have a beautiful dynamic of mutual learning and growth. We talked about our growing mutual interest in privacy and I showed her how to set up an RSS reader. There are so many assumptions about who is supposed to be good at computers and who is supposed to stop keeping up with emerging technology as they age, and we're both interested in breaking them.
There are a lot of reasons to have friends your age as you move through different milestones. I didn't ask friends decades older or younger than me for wedding planning advice, because the wedding industry has shifted so much (but I always ask for marriage advice from people who have a good thing going). It's nice sharing some cultural moments with people, like going to a Postal Service reunion show hits differently for those of us in our late thirties. I talk to friends my age as we worry about parents getting older. We're in the same place, and it feels nice to get it.
Most of life, though, is just managing transitions. They don't stop coming, and friends older or younger than you are still managing change. People older than you have been through things you are going to face. People younger than you are managing similar changes and milestones as you at that age but in a different world.
Links:
- This Smithsonian Magazine article is about Baltimore's central role in stolen cadaver distribution for medical schools, which is why the city is home to elaborate cemetery fences and gates
- Holly Whitaker has a new podcast. Her book wasn't really my favorite, I really like her newsletter, but her podcasting and figuring things out on air with other people is what's really helpful for me. She hosted a recovery podcast a decade ago called Home that I listened to through my early sobriety. She had a personal collapse at the same time as when I had long covid, and her newsletters were kind of a lifeline when my world felt really fucked because she had some words I couldn't find. This new one is called Co-Regulation and it's what it says on the tin - this latest one is called "How Soothing Your Nervous System IS Managing the Crisis"
- The Animal Photo Reference Repository is amazing for non-AI animals now that image searches are full of what I will now call the baby peacock problem