I ran out of things to write about two weeks ago and I can only talk about my boring days so much. So let’s talk about that YouTube video I just saw that did nothing to help with my constant feeling of hopelessness. Actually I feel so hopeless that I don’t care enough to write about how hopeless I feel.
I need a haircut. But I’m too lazy to find the pictures of the haircut I liked, so who knows when that will happen.
I spent my evening putting together online jigsaw puzzles of bird pictures. How exciting is that?
If you could learn more about some subject — scientific, scholarly, or artistic — what subject would you choose?
That’s a deep question on such a nonsense post. 🙂 I think most of my interests are things I want to do rather than things I want to learn, but if I look at it as “What would I study if I went back to school” it would be a toss-up between toxicology/pharmacology and some mix of art/graphic design and web design. I much prefer making things but toxicology was the one subject that could make me want to stay in a scientific field.
How about you?
I wasn’t presuming study through enrolment with some programme. Most of my own study of academic subjects has been without the guidance or demands of such enrolment.
Generally, the problem with “What do I wish that I could be doing?” is that the answers entail resources that can’t be spared or are otherwise unavailable, perhaps especially scheduled time. And formal instruction presents the same problem.
But you could, for example master Inkscape on your own, during those times that you were wondering what to do with the next hour. And you can find books on graphic design in local libraries or through Hamilton Books.
And maybe life will feel better with some sense that you’ve developed an ability that you wanted.
If I were to seek formal instruction, it would be in a craft — in glass-sculpting maybe — because I think that I can learn by listening and observation in those areas more readily than by reading. Things such as math I’d do better studying quite on my own.
Oh, I should have worded that better. I didn’t mean to imply that I want to/would only learn that through formal study, rather that your question has a different answer pretty much every week, if not every day. The only way I could think of to narrow it down was to consider what I would want to study if an outside force forced some degree of commitment, if that makes any sense.
I do agree that learning and hopefully one day mastering something would probably be beneficial to my mood. Just thinking about your comment unpacked a lot of baggage about ingrained ideas on how my current job is “bad” and therefore I can’t rationalize putting even more time into it. Definitely something to work on.
Also one of the issues I’ve always encountered is that while I don’t really enjoy formal classes, I like the pre-made schedule and homework/exams to keep one accountable. I’ve never been able to replicate that in my personal life. (Hence why I also would do better with something like glass-sculpting where there would have to be other people involved, as opposed to math which I used to love but have since forgotten basically everything.)
Do you remember when people had pen pals way back when? I had a pen pal in Japan and it took about a month to get her letters. I think the amount of time it takes me to compose a reply is a pretty good approximation of that old-fashioned hobby.
I’m old enough to have lived when pen pals were fairly common (and when adults encouraged children to connect with pen pals), and not so old as to have forgot such things.