If someone - an archaeologist, a historian, anyone from the future - were to unearth three artifacts, which ones would say the most about me? Well, that's actually harder to answer than I first thought. Someone could dig up a stapler from the fossilized remains of my desk, and what would that tell them about me? I stapled things. I could be an office worker. Or a lawyer, a mathematician. Lots of people use staplers.
My first choice, the one thing I might actually want someone to find, would be my iPod. It would be extremely unlikely that any of our technology could work in an advanced, super electronic culture, but it's kind of nice to think that a complete stranger could look through every carefully selected song, the same way I do. Creepy to think about excessively, but still nice. I think that my music says the most about me, and its how I can bond with a lot of people. Some people I might never think about talking to - like this guy in the future whose digging up my old stuff - could love my favorite song. My iPod is like the documentation of that.
Next would have to be the pickle dish. The best pickle dish. A plate with more personality than something actually capable for having one. My brother painted it when he was just a toddler, completely new to the whole 'art' concept. He'd finished the whole thing in less than five minutes, but it remained in the heart of everyone forever. The only problem? I broke it. Nobody will ever let me forget the fact that I broke the beloved pickle dish, instead choosing to point it out everytime we say anything related to the topic. Since it was such a treasured possession, we couldn't just throw it away, so the cracked corners are just a monument to my eternal stupidity and klutziness. Just because it was me who did it, everyone tends to forget that the pickle dish meant just as much to me as everyone else. So, even though the infamous pickle dish belongs to my unsentimental brother, it describes me just as much.
The one place I spend more time than anywhere, the Newbury theater, holds another artifact they could dig up about me. I've been working backstage there since middle school, and one of my first assignments was to assemble to pieces into a shelving unit sturdy enough to hold part of our vast prop collection. Despite all the complaining of it being too tall, they haven't moved it since, maybe because they knew how fond I was of it. I've forgotten how many times I've tried to organize the individual drawers and shelves, always giving up halfway through. You can probably still find some of my masking tape labels stuck to the back, or my scripts wedged underneath a stack of a random set piece we'll never use again. Eventually, I just claimed one of the drawers for my own. Most people wouldn't find anything special about a shelving unit, specially one that wasn't put together very well in the first place. But, it does a very good job of connecting theater with everything and everyone else I love.
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