Rabbit Tracks!
Dec. 26th, 2023 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoySo my niece, Burgie,* has spent this holiday season campaigning for an American Girl doll. Mom carefully put together her beloved Kirsten doll, which we kids pooled our money and bought her way back when, with a collection of doll stuff and sent it along for Xmas.
Yesterday morning I was in the shower and idly wondering how that reveal went down, and it occurred to me: Mom didn't send any of the books! Oh, no! How will Burgie get any context for her doll without the books!
Then it occurred to me that Burgie is 5.
Yeah, the books are not going to be an issue.**
But it made me realize that I was 8 when I got Molly, at a developmental stage when, as a young, autistic kid, I was RIPE for a hyperfixation. I read the AG books obsessively, absorbing all of the historical information they offered and charging off on re-creating the stuff from their time periods, basically diving deep wherever and however I could.
And I spent this Xmas season doing the same! I've been rabbit-holing nonstop the past few days. Trying to find context for Dad's stories of Grandma's Horrendous Oyster "Stew" on Christmas Eves, trying to track down what the hell the Spudnuts he was reminiscing about were (and tracking down the recipe), trying to decipher морозко in its original language (having seen the MST3k version), looking over how accurate the Muppet Christmas Carol is, looking up how the Japanese would say "eggnog" (エッグノッグ), and trying out a recipe for sweet potato pudding from the vintage Southern cookbook with the questionable illustrations my buddy Nick gave me. It's a blast, and lights up my synapses like a cosmic laser light show.
And I feel like Pleasant Company, at least early on, really got this. I developed my penchant for rabbit-holing from looking up Molly's stuff and trying to dress Felicity in her elaborate network of undergarments.*** I didn't have access to internet In Those Days, so it took a lot more Ghostwriter-type detective work to try to look shit up. Then in college I had the internet and got into weird AG doll fandom, and I could dive into all sorts of things to make DIY stuff for them! (I'm still inordinately proud of Daja. She took a lot of work!)I'm glad Burgie's got search engines and Wikipedia for easy access to more information, because she won't be 5 forever, and we'll just see where this takes her.
*Short for Cheeseburger. Don't ask.
**Brother says Mom had included one of those little brochures to kind of contextualize one of Kirsten's holiday sets, and Burgie pretty much glazed over as Bro was reading it to her. Meanwhile, he's rather astonished to discover that Kirsten settled in Minnesota. It might say a lot about me that I thought he knew that.
***No, seriously, do the stays go above the shift or below it?
Yesterday morning I was in the shower and idly wondering how that reveal went down, and it occurred to me: Mom didn't send any of the books! Oh, no! How will Burgie get any context for her doll without the books!
Then it occurred to me that Burgie is 5.
Yeah, the books are not going to be an issue.**
But it made me realize that I was 8 when I got Molly, at a developmental stage when, as a young, autistic kid, I was RIPE for a hyperfixation. I read the AG books obsessively, absorbing all of the historical information they offered and charging off on re-creating the stuff from their time periods, basically diving deep wherever and however I could.
And I spent this Xmas season doing the same! I've been rabbit-holing nonstop the past few days. Trying to find context for Dad's stories of Grandma's Horrendous Oyster "Stew" on Christmas Eves, trying to track down what the hell the Spudnuts he was reminiscing about were (and tracking down the recipe), trying to decipher морозко in its original language (having seen the MST3k version), looking over how accurate the Muppet Christmas Carol is, looking up how the Japanese would say "eggnog" (エッグノッグ), and trying out a recipe for sweet potato pudding from the vintage Southern cookbook with the questionable illustrations my buddy Nick gave me. It's a blast, and lights up my synapses like a cosmic laser light show.
And I feel like Pleasant Company, at least early on, really got this. I developed my penchant for rabbit-holing from looking up Molly's stuff and trying to dress Felicity in her elaborate network of undergarments.*** I didn't have access to internet In Those Days, so it took a lot more Ghostwriter-type detective work to try to look shit up. Then in college I had the internet and got into weird AG doll fandom, and I could dive into all sorts of things to make DIY stuff for them! (I'm still inordinately proud of Daja. She took a lot of work!)I'm glad Burgie's got search engines and Wikipedia for easy access to more information, because she won't be 5 forever, and we'll just see where this takes her.
*Short for Cheeseburger. Don't ask.
**Brother says Mom had included one of those little brochures to kind of contextualize one of Kirsten's holiday sets, and Burgie pretty much glazed over as Bro was reading it to her. Meanwhile, he's rather astonished to discover that Kirsten settled in Minnesota. It might say a lot about me that I thought he knew that.
***No, seriously, do the stays go above the shift or below it?
