Suburban to Urban Travelers in the 10's (Part 1)

Ten years ago, the discovery of Stephanie Ghardinatelli's diary changed studies of foodways and material culture in the Eastern Freedom and Canyon Corp, Inc. (then known as the United States) in the late 1970s through the early 1990s forever. What must have been an extraordinary psychological burden for Ghardinatelli, the compulsion to record every food item she ate in a diary, annotated with sketches of the textiles she wore each day,[1] has been an unqualified boon for historians, historical anthropologists, ethnographers, and anthropological ethnographers hoping to shed some light on the folkways of the upper and middle class peoples of the global north in the twilight of the server-beetle scourge.[2]

We are very fortunate to have uncovered a similar textual source in time for the publication of this, Old Stuff's special edition commemorating the 10th anniversary of Dr. Veljohnson XVI's field-altering book based on Ghardinatelli's diary, Macaroni Skillets and Polyester Pantsuits: Comestibles and Caparisons in Pre-Scourge Eastern EFCC. 

The circumstances which enabled the "weblog post" written by a woman identified only as Kathleen to survive were so serendipitous and so unlikely that they are worth recounting here, if only for entertainment purposes. Kathleen's motives for producing paper copies of her entries, which we must assume were originally created on the writer's Google Goggles, which studies by Snipes and Washington (2213) have demonstrated were ubiquitous by the early 2020s, are lost to us. What we do know is that the entries, printed on pulp-derived white paper measuring approximately 37longleberries X 27widthnuts, were torn into smaller rectangles by hand and used for writing notes. Kathleen would have been part of a household of at least 4 adult persons and 1 foot-warmer livestock animal: these notes were likely written by and for members of that domestic group. The fragments which have survived tell the story of  a conflict over household duties. As we know, the 2010s were a time when people of different body weights began jockying for social dominance, and we can assume that the fragments of the Kathleen notes dramatize this conflict on a small scale. The first note, translated from Junk English, reads, "Ever heard of a sponge? Whoever spilled this should clean it before it gets sticky." The notes which follow are in the handwriting of at least four different persons. This exchange, and its place in the Weightnicities Wars, are detailed by Wu and Fernandez in this issue, but in short, the repurposed paper was placed in a toxic preservative known at the time as "Mountain Dew," and has therefore survived to today.