Today was a day where my body failed me, and my mind threatened to go along with the ride. Having battled a cold for the last week, and fighting the good fight or so I thought, my final push to health was brought to a halt by a machine gun hail of racking coughs and booming headaches. After insuring my boss was aware of my predicament I promptly fell asleep for a few more hours. When I woke I shuffled into the kitchen, put on the kettle, swallowed some vitamin C, prepared a pharmaceutical draft of Lemsip with real lemons, and wearily and self pityingly sloughed my way into my rather cozy living room. All sounding somewhat soothing and settling yes, but in point this is where my usual restlessness would kick in.
For me the time to think is both blessing and damnation. If indeed a specific subject task or preoccupation is filling my mental inbox, I am more than capable of a focused and rapt attention kept stream of thought, indeed it can be quite precise in its devising’s and solution solving problems. But with more time than task, my mind wanders down the wrong rabbit holes, and I am known to be found dwelling in doubts and despairs and working myself into quite a state, and being locked in a sickly shell has another unenviable aspect of turning me even further introspective as a matter of being unable to externalise any form of energy. Yet today I actually stumbled upon the truthful wonders of the internet and social networking. I have kind of been a little ‘curmudgeonly’ about peoples use of the internet.A world of intelligent, inspiring facts and fictions delivered to your minds doorway, and using it solely to download porn, look up pictures of teen idols and post inane comments and cringingly self aggrandizing YouTube videos. Today I indulged myself and did a link and post tour of the people I follow on Twitter, and I realised I was lucky to be able to garner access to some pretty fantastically creatively gifted and mentally apportioned individuals who are willing to preserve wonderful words, speak their magnificent minds, and share their passions so freely. I almost wished I had more to share myself, rather than simply semi-witty pithy rejoinders and amateurish tropes and language alterations.
Today I saw the grand scheme of social interaction, the meme machine in action. It was actually quite glorious truth be told. I started with the Tom Lehrer experience, which I had only previously been aware of in regards to the ‘Elements’ song, and that set me chuckling and Wikipedia-ing him. I then watched the Feynman Lecture at Auckland in 1979, and even though I was falling asleep I actually picked up some key points as to wave properties. This in turn led me to watch a BBC show on the measuring of a piece of string, which dealt with everything from light measurement and fractals, to the double slit experiment and Schrodinger’s cat. There was then a brief blog burst, with Amanda Palmer, Stephen Fry, Aeroplane girl and Brain-Pickings. As well as just random clicks on masterpieces of factoids and fictive missives, literary legends and memorable quotes.
Almost mentally sated I then returned to reading my recently purchased ‘Neverwhere’ by Neil Gaiman interspersed with quick trips to Amazon to download Dickens complete collection as well as Ignatius Donnelly and Shakespeare, for a grand total of $1.99. So all in all, today, was a pretty good day to spend semi-delirious on a couch.
Viva la Browse!
This is the reason my laundry is never done, my room is a mess, and I’m always running out the door with my hair uncombed. The internet is a black hole of knowledge that does nothing good for my attention span problem. Just wait…before long you’ll be bookmarking HTML tutorial websites and taking free classes at MIT.