Brittany Hansen cut her husband's hair. Her blog post is of her conversion to DIY. What else can be DIY? Share your ideas. Ask for others. Everybody's got their own DIY ideas. If you DIY, you can be awesome. You can make light shows, costumes, and masks. I can do what I want! Should I do random things? For myself? As a gift? Should I make it a project? That's what Julie Powell did. "Julie and Julia" was a good movie. Julia Child studied at Le Cordon Bleu. They have campuses all over the world, but, more importantly, I can get a degree in cake-baking. That is more important because cake is a "sweet baked dessert". Cake is the most important. I mean, just look at it. Cake. That's all I can think about. Like the blog post on Hyperbole and Half. I don't know that I'm the "god of cake", but I'm pretty close.
I'll stop there because cake is always a good note to end on. I could easily keep going (in fact, I kind of did for a while) but this is sufficient. If you followed all of the links, congratulations! Go eat a cake or something! But if you just read straight through, well, you kind of missed the point. And what exactly is that point? It is that this is EXACTLY what my mind does. Always. One idea leads to another, and somehow I go from reading Brittany's post about cutting hair, to being a god of cake. It is good to go exploring like this, but when does it become too much? At what point have we lost the academic aspect of it?
Today in class, we were discussing curating and curating tools. My next post will be as Dr. Burton said, about how we can specifically use those tools, but I wanted to use this as a sort of precursor. My idea of what curating does for us is that it prevents this, or it gives us an anchor as our minds go exploring. And even if you end up wandering way off track, maybe you will accidentally find something golden, add it to your curating tool of choice, and come back to it when your mind as wandered sufficiently. What are your thoughts on mind-wandering and/or its relationship to curating?
A clever prelude to curating! You could even curate the topic of attention, or of link wandering, or whatever you want to call it.
ReplyDeleteWell I'm really glad my post led you to cake! haha I really like this topic because I think you're right, our thought processes basically dictate what we curate, how we curate, and where we curate. For example, why do people confess to spending way too much time on Facebook? Because their best friend just got engaged and her sister commented and you go to her sister's page and there's a funny video that somehow leads you to a recipe... right?! So keeping track of various things is very useful, especially to see how well you're spending your time. You make curating sound really fun, and I like that.
ReplyDeleteThis was great. Not only great ideas, but great writing too. Plus, who doesn't love cake?? I like this idea of curating as being almost a wandering around on the internet, because like you said and Brittany also echoed was that we go to one place, which leads us to another, and another and eventually we look at the clock and realize we have just been wandering around on the web for way longer than we ever meant to.
ReplyDeleteI do think curating is useful for the reasons you've mentioned, but I also think exploring is valuable. Part of finding meaning in life is discovery and the ability to make connections among sometimes seemingly unrelated concepts. At least I know I learn the best when I can make a connection between what I'm trying to learn and something I already know. I think as long as you're learning and not spending excessive time on it, wandering is a valuable exercise, as well as curating.
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