Documentarian

I am reading a book called The Mistress's Daughter. At this point, the subject of the book is making her way through boxes of papers left behind by her dead birth mother. Although she has had the boxes for years, she is just now looking through them. She's afraid to but also, she had gotten to know her birth mother a bit in the years before she died and she was a scary manipulative woman, basically.

She is looking to learn something about her birth mother. Something beyond the woman she met.

It makes me think of my journals and who might read them someday. It will have to be long after I'm gone cause really, that would be embarrassing. (It's embarrassing enough that I'm narcissistic enough to wonder about this) I do not have a child I gave up for adoption so whoever would read about me might already know who I am. Or at least they'd know of me, I would think. I wonder how my journals might present me. I wonder if they are accurate to who I am. Or, do my emotions or life experiences lead me to edit and as a result only a fraction of me comes through?

My sister-in-law told me that I am documentarian from every angle. I write a journal about personal stuff, I write a blog about less personal stuff, and I photograph everything left.

The daughter in the book also wonders what kind of teen her mother was - one who dressed like and adult or one who wore poodle skirts?

Last night I was watching Taking Woodstock with my parents. At one point, a bunch of hippies started dancing around naked on the lawn of a motel to greet some lawyers and organizers looking to set-up shop for Woodstock. The short stout elderly woman who runs the hotel yells at them, running at them with a broom, "Cover up your bits! We've got company!"

It was funny, but I digress. 'Ever wonder what you'd be like born in a different era? I'd like to think that if were Alice Paul's age ("Iron Jawed Angels" is a must watch) that I'd join the forces and be a suffragette. In the 1960s, would I be a hippie or an activist?

Or would I be neither? Just a photographer documenting it all?