Museum Mania!

I've probably talked about this at some point here (January 18th, as a matter of fact), but at the Missouri Academy, we used the True Colors personality test with students and staff regarding styles, strengths, and the like. The test has four colors (Green, Orange, Gold, and Blue), and each person exhibits every color to some extent or another. My previous entry talked about how Gold (organized and structured) and Blue (empathetic and harmony-seeking) are two colors that are consistently vying for my top strength. Orange (spontaneous & competitive) is always my shadow color (aka least prominent), but Green is usually a runner for a top color along with Gold and Blue.

I talk about being Green less often because I'm usually hesitant to say "yes, all of these Green qualities fit me to a t". Some of those qualities including curiosity, looking at the big picture, and being detached and objective. I do enjoy those times of being an information sponge, but the "detached and objective" piece is where I get a little hung up. I know True Colors doesn't actually work this way but I feel like Green personalities & Blue personalities are at ends with each other regarding emotional expression and weighing logic with empathy, where as Orange personalities and Gold personalities battle over planning/spontaneity and the value of tradition. In reality, every competition of colors does exist, even if I feel like my Green and Blue are like Bruce Wayne and Batman.

Okay, this is getting off-topic from my original idea. Green personality meaning information sponge. Yes, today is Pony Express Day and it made me think about museums and Green being a part of my personality. So, one of my roles in Missouri was helping the new international students adjust to rural US culture. One weekend in early August, we would take the students to nearby St. Joseph, which included a museum or three. This included the Pony Express one year, since the Pony Express started in St. Joseph.

I know that the students may not have gotten a lot of the museum visits, but I loved going to the different museums and learning about different parts of history. One museum we went to yearly was the Glore Psychiactric Museum/St. Joseph Museum/Black Archives Museum, where I was still learning things even in my third year going there. (Side Note: I will say that some of the stuff in the Glore Psychiactric Museum is just creepy, especially if you're the only person in that room.)

"Museum" can feel like a blanket term, but I feel like I've been to a fair enough of museums - from huge museums like a number of Smithsonian museums in DC and the Field Museum in Chicago, to small/specific ones like the Glenn Miller Birthplace Museum in Clarinda, Iowa and A Christmas Story House in Cleveland. (Definitely one of the reasons why I liked DC so much and I want to go back since I know there were places I missed.) I feel like there's a museum for pretty much anything, just like holidays.

I'm trying to find a way to explain why I love museums, and yeah, I'm falling back to the phrase "information sponge". It's just fun to go somewhere and see so much history and detail about this one facet of life (like a car company or an actor) and know that it's both this little story, but also a part of the larger world around it. There are a couple of museums in the area that I want to go to at some point while I'm living here. None of them spark the "oh my gosh I need to go that" desire, but if you couldn't tell by reading the ramble above, I like museums.

DFTBA