7 Quick Takes: Mappity Maps

--1--

I am the co-director of the Youth Group at Saint Martin de Porres Church, a working class mission church.The Youth Group is tiny with an even tinier budget. It's a struggle to find a balance between the desire to be of service, to have some fun, and to accomplish this without spending all our time fundraising. Our answer to the problem is called the Pilgrims of the Holy Family. The closest description I can give is to liken it to Boy Scouts for Catholics, badges and all.

But coed...

...and holy...

You know, with saints...

--2--

This month we are working on the Pathfinding Badge: maps and orienteering.  I love maps. I peruse maps. This has given me every excuse to spend entire evenings of precious mommy-of-five free-time pouring over maps and compasses. In fact, an entire Youth Group meeting was spent in our local library. Not only did the Reference Librarian bring us maps and atlases from the Reference Section, she brought them up from the basement archives, too. But to top it off we were allowed to visit the locked research room chock full of historically precious articles: maps among them. We read a bit from Cook's voyages, laughing with the librarian over the ffs for ss and joking with a lisp. We read maps in French, Spanish, and Latin, giggling over inaccuracies and marveling at the amount of human history told in them. We held settlers' trail maps, terrain maps, and settlement maps. We imagined battles, plotted routes, and wondered, all while breathing the rarefied air of the historian: that smell of ancient parchment.

As a special treat, since we were Catholic, we were allowed to open and explore a Bishop's personal papers, in Spanish, from the early 1800s. Particularly touching were the photographs of his mother and father. I can not begin to tell you how amazing an experience we had.

--3--

Meanwhile, if I never mentioned that I love maps, you must know it by now. When my husband wants to get me an extra special gift, he does not buy jewelry, he buys maps. He's done it twice now and I am the proud owner of one replicated 19th Century world map and two antique sets of social studies maps from a 1950s classroom. They are more precious to me than gold. I am a Mappy. I admit it. If given a choice between driving to a destination and navigating: I'll take the map!

--4--

Which means that, yes, I know how to find you. I have an interior map that activates when I hear a place name. You say, "Phoenix, Arizona" and my interior life resembles one giant four dimensional map (time is a dimension. I factor it in calculating air, car, and covered wagon travel times). Since I've driven there, this interior map actually contains highway numbers, alternate routes, seasonal climate factors, and mountain ranges. This is so innate that I tend to point in the direction you should travel if you want to meet whomever I happen to be discussing, even when they live on another continent.

If we've met and you live someplace I've never been to, I've Googled you. Just for the map, you understand.

--5--

If you don't know how to negotiate a map and compass, I found this video to teach the skill to the Youth Group. It's a quick and easy How-To.

--6--

In the above video, PackRat brings up declination and promises to explain how to compensate for it in another video. Since he explained compasses and maps so clearly, I sought out his explanation of declination, too. It's just as clear and simple as the first video.

The Magnetic North that attracts the needle of your compass and true North are not the same. It's due to the fascinating fact that our magnetic core shifts around somehow and causes our planet's magnetic field to change by 7 minutes (spatially, not temporally) a year, which is enough that maps have to be constantly updated because of it. You have to do a little math to keep from missing your destination.

Declination becomes important the farther you travel, especially if you are traveling long distances. If you are hiking in an area with 10 degrees of declination, you will be 1,000 feet off course in a single mile. In longer distances, that 10 degrees will matter more and more. Miss a port by 10 degrees after traveling 1,000 miles over the open sea and you could wind up in an entirely different country.





For those of you who like to get your Geek on, you can go to this web page and find out your city's declination.You plug in your U.S. Zip Code or your country and city to find your Latitude and Longitude coordinates, and the page will calculate it for you. You can even track the changes in declination through time. For example the declination of Washington, D.C., is -11.2. It used to be -6.1 in 1913. Back in 1776, the declination was -0.9. I find it fascinating that the world under our feet seems so stable, when in fact, even something as accurate as a compass can steer you wrong.

--7--

My confessor, Father Barnabus, is still undergoing treatment and could use your prayers. His spirits are good, but his activities are very limited. He could use the spiritual support. In fact, he'd be the first to remind me to include all priests in this prayer request. Priests need our prayers even when they aren't undergoing chemo.

Girl with a slight taste in art...



The movie "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is coming out. They couldn't have picked a better actress to play the role, and wow, this poster representation of the painting is a work of art in its own right. Simply amazing.

So that's about as positive as I'm going to get in preparation of the movie because I really, really like the painting and I've seen the previews. It looks to be another one of those (boring and overdone) anachronistic movies where Hollywood hyper-sexualizes a culture to better match our current post-Kinseyan and post-oral contraception mores of today. I hope I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I am not going to make any wagers.

 

Directors and screenwriters feel they need to dumb down sexual cultural differences in order to help moviegoers access the characters. No need to risk making the effort to actually be interesting. You'd never know it through watching a movie, but there is a major difference in women's sexuality now versus (any other) then: women today are obliged to have sex or face censure; women of the past were obliged not to. Hollywood applauds the former and scorns the latter, even when portraying a time period that clearly honored chastity as the ideal.

 

Cultural differences in Hollywood, at least when it comes to desire and restraint, only show up in matters of negotiating the laces of those painfully accurate corsets. Steamy sex scenes have been so overdone as to be...*yawn*...formulaic. Ironically, of all entertainment institutions, Hollywood should know that it is the chase scenes that titillate more than the catch.  

History Lesson!

With that graph in mind, I pulled together a few sites for you. Exam season is coming.

After this one, you'll never forget the Mesopotamians again!


I just like it because of that goat.

If you know the Presidents, you can keep track of the American History timeline. Use the Animaniacs to get them memorized. You never know when you'll need to know what you know.



If none of these suit your taste or needs, here is a link to a gazillion more.

Yeah, so maybe the next stop should be math--for the names of numbers more than 999,999,999,999. We may need those names if the only thing we want to emulate from President Bushie is the money problems.

Settle Down

Long Lost
By Christie Martin

After years
I send you
You send me
Missives
And sheaves

We read

If I held your look
Once
I hold your words
Now
I read you
In the aches and spaces
Between

Does blood run
Black and white
Or laughter slip
like paper cuts
Along the fine seams
Between paper and skin?

Where, O where
have you been?


You know you are finally home when you watch your cousin give the weather report. I am finally in a place where I have roots. The region of the country where I now live is where my parents grew up and my extended family has always lived. It was a place I used to visit now and again. I grew up in a military family and moved several times in my childhood: less than some, but enough to get the habit well established. I continued the practice in my adult years.

I love to start over. I like the clean slate. I like introductions and the thrill of discovery. Everyone is on an even playing field at the beginning. The flaws in the turf have yet to be stumbled over. The wrestling of a friendship from an acquaintance is great sport.

Yet, it has cost me as I moved from pature to greener pasture. I have lost many contacts along the way. I have lived on two coasts and several states. My geography is pegged with longing for faces and voices out of reach in time and space.

Internet inventions like Facebook, e-mail, and even Google have given me the gift of reconnections. My life has been enriched by the reintroduction of those "I knew when." History is something we outrun, but it does catch up with us eventually.

History is to the culture like friendship is to the soul. We need to have an objective look now and then at who we were to fully understand who we are and who we may wind up being. Sometimes a change in direction is necessary. Sometimes, we need to come home, wherever that may be, put our feet to the fire and be quiet.

As unmoored as one single life can become at the loss of connections with the past, a culture can as easily be cast adrift. We have a human need to stay grounded in our past. From Frederick Douglas to John Adams from Socrates to the Apostle Paul, the writers who call to us out of history act as friends to the lumbering psyche of a people. They remind us of where we've been, the failed experiments we've already tried as well as the trials that have led to success. Like a truly good friend they can point out our habits and flaws along with our strengths and admirable qualities.

We need history. Without it we forget who we are and must reinvent ourselves. When we do that we run the risk of losing sight of who we were meant to be.

A Last Thought: "Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections." G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, June 6, 1931.