It's Not Always About What I Have To Say

Sometimes wise people say wise things phrased in wise ways that make the point better than I can.

Harlem Elvis from John X. Carey on Vimeo.

Today I Learned

I’m a sucker for quotes. They are one of those oddball academic tools that I'm always trying to become better with. I love those moments where you're able to throw out a well placed topical quote during conversation. They are regrettably few and far between for me, but I do try. I’ve heard quoting decried as a method for simpler minds to get out of thinking for themselves, but I think that’s utter hooey. Sometimes wise people say wise things phrased in wise ways that make the point better than I can. Eric Schmidt, one of the heads of Google, said the following, which is one of my favorites. It’s kind of perfect. It’s clear, concise, and more right on than anything I’d heard on the subject to date:

To say that the internet has changed the world is an exercise in understatement. To argue whether that change has been for the better or for the worse is an exercise in futility. One must simply except it as it is and ride the beta-testing wave.

One thing that our new web world has done though that I've always found interesting is its creation of trends that exist solely within its own confines. As silly as they often are, I find memes and the idea of things "going viral" to be kind of fascinating. More specifically to my thoughts today however is the evolution of one trend in particular - Cyber-slang. How incredible that the internet has given way to the creation of its own language. I don’t mean code or anything binary, I mean actual new words and phrasing. It’s mostly young people that have co-opted this truncated form of communication, sometimes referred to as netspeak. In fact, when it comes out of the mouths of “olds” it often sounds silly or forced. Mostly, the new words or idioms are innocuous – cute or funny ways that people relate to each other and themselves (there’s something oddly freeing about throwing a fist in the air and bellowing “YOLO” as you run Braveheart-style towards some goal). It’s not always good though. Internet short-hand has been responsible for bad things. As my husband once said, to which I wholeheartedly agreed, “TLDR is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.”

My personal favorite? “TIL” or “Today I Learned.” This is usually followed up with some fun fact or unique observation on the world. As I’ve pointed out before, consistently increasing your knowledge is something I hope no one stops doing, although I’m not so naïve as to think that’s actually going to happen. Granted I do know that for the most part, this happy little anagram is used for meme-based fun, but the spirit behind it is close to my heart. It also reflects one of the reasons I love Saturday mornings.

My husband and I have polar opposite sleeping habits. He needs at least eight hours. I’m ok with seven or even six. He can fall asleep anytime he wants, whereas I will lie awake for hours unless something is talking to me – the TV or him reading aloud are common nighttime rituals in our home (and consequently how I managed to get through the final two Harry Potter books).  During the work week, he always gets up first, walks the dogs, eats breakfast, and acts like a normal human being. Meanwhile I snore away in bed until I finally drag myself out of the cozy sheets and slog the ten feet from my bed to my computer to start my work day. I’m a stereotypical night-owl. He is not. Sometimes I make him stay up with me, or at least try my hardest to get him to keep his eyes open.

As a token of my never ending gratitude for his indulgence of my juvenile no-one-can-tell-me-when-it’s-bedtime attitude, on Saturday mornings I let him sleep in as long as wants. It’s usually pretty substantial and obviously well needed. Yet there is a bit of self-gratification in my seemingly selfless act. I admit that I do enjoy that time to myself. I make coffee and read the internet. Whatever’s on the internet. However it gets even better when my husband finally does wake up and joins me.

One of my singular favorite things about my marriage is the ability that the two of us have to just sit and simply talk. About anything. Virtually every time we make the two to three hour drive to one of our parents’ houses, I make sure to pack my well stocked ipod, only to have it sit unused in my purse because we just end up chatting the whole way, having barely touched the radio. Lately we’ve gotten into the habit of spending all of our Saturday mornings, finishing off the coffee I brewed, and discussing whatever comes to mind. A lot of times, this involves questioning and then attempting to verify something on the ol internet. I heart Wikipedia.

Because of this, I feel like I’m always learning. There’s little out there that I don’t care to learn about.  I also hold true to the idea that I will never ever know everything, and that there will always be someone who knows more than me thus ensuring that I can always learn from hearing and talking about things I didn’t know about before. I’ve been called opinionated in the past, and I admit that even though I never mean to, I probably come off like that because I “stick to my guns” so to speak about certain things. But conviction doesn’t mean that I think hearing something contrary to what I already think and know is a waste of time. 

That’s one of the reasons I blog. I have a tendency to internally project my feelings on others, or rather to delude myself into thinking that people think like me. Therefore I talk about or write about things that I think other people will care to know even though I’m probably the only one. I assume people, like me, want to hear these things and then take the time to learn about them. I don’t know how many regular readers I have out there. I don’t know if I want to find out. Since clicking on and off of this blog is entirely voluntary, I’m just going to continue to write about the things that I discover and which I find quiet interesting. 

Here are three things I’ve recently learned about either on those treasured weekend mornings or just in the excitation of my free time. I think other people should know them. Or at least want to know them.

If loving this is wrong, I don't want to be right.

1) Dog Vomit Slime Mold: You read that right. The window over my kitchen sink looks out into the backyard. I have a weird love for this window. I don’t know exactly how to describe it other than an appreciation of its quaint completeness. The view contains a large viburnum which shades the ground beneath it, causing little to grow there, as its fuller branches don’t allow much light to shine though. So one day I’m standing there, washing my hands, and gazing lovingly at my giant shrubby tree, when I notice a huge patch of bright yellow blob on the semi-dark ground beneath. First question out my husband’s mouth was “Did one of the dogs puke?” That’s honestly what it looked like, but the color had me thinking we had to be wrong, or else the dogs didn’t have much longer on this earth. A little web investigation and we found out it is actually something called fuligo septica – more commonly known as the “Dog Vomit Slime Mold.” Huh. Go figure.

I found an old, but great article here that answered all of my worries while teaching me something totally fascinating and new. Turns out this isn’t a fungus or a mold after all, but actually a “Plasmodium.” What is this awesomely crazy science-y sounding word you ask? “They are not molds (a kind of fungi); they are not plants, animals or bacteria, either. A slime mold is a completely different kind of critter. We see it in just part of its life cycle, as a plasmodium, which essentially is one giant cell with millions of nuclei. It is formed when two spores come together in something a little bit like sex and begin dividing into a large creeping blob of protoplasm surrounded by a single membrane. The plasmodium moves by slowly flowing or streaming, gradually engulfing and consuming fungi and bacteria that are present on decaying plant matter. Many a horror movie has owed its inspiration to plasmodiums.”  And it loves to live in fresh, wet, dense mulch - much like what we had laid in that same spot not a week beforehand. Sadly, before we found out it was completely harmless, we scooped it all up and tossed it. A little survived and came back the next day, but it was so humid and hazy in that place where it thrived, that I couldn’t get a decent picture. The below is from the web. Mine looked more like I was photographing some Ecuadorian rain forest rather than a suburban garden in North Carolina purchased primarily with Home Depot gift cards.

You can’t really get rid of fuligo septica, you just have to let it run its course, as ours did. One article I read stated, “you might as well find some way to enjoy it.” Thank you slime mold. I think I have.

2) The Names of the Nine Supreme Court justices:  You can’t turn on a TV or a radio or the internet without hearing the word “Obamacare.” The latest news in this bit of American history was SCOTUS’s move to uphold the constitutionality of some of the key tenets of the ACA’s reformatory goals. The mister and I made a point one morning to memorize all these names. No matter where you stand on the issue, you really should at least know the names of the people that are deciding your health care fate. In no particular order:

     1) John Roberts

     2) Clarence Thomas

     3) Ruth Bader Ginsberg

     4) Stephen Breyer

     5) Antonin Scalia

     6) Anthony Kennedy

     7) Sonia Sotomayor

     8) Samuel Alito

     9) Elena Kagen

Ok, a little order maybe. I put Elena Kagen last because she’s the one I usually forget. I get her confused with Kay Hagen who’s one of my state senators. Those two names are too obscure to be so similar sounding. What’s the average gal to do?

3) How To Make Things With GIMP: GIMP is like a poor man’s Photoshop. More specifically, it’s a shareware image editing/creating program. I’ve been using it for quite some time to help clean up overexposed or speckled photographs. Since I’m in no way a graphic designer, I have no need to spend money on fancy shmancy programs that I will never use. Plus they have the most adorable raccoon logo named Wilber.

I’ve been meaning for some time to change the name of this blog. The previous moniker, “Notes from the Underbelly,” didn’t really fit, and to be honest, was more about what I intended to do with this blog rather than what it organically became. As I stated in my first entry, I was trying to devise a “structured outlet for a journey I plan on making. Through art and food, I plan to rekindle whatever it is I think needs rekindling.” Um, ok? I’m not really sure what that even means or if I even knew what it meant at the time. When I started this blog, I had just moved to NC, away from everyone I knew, with only one dog, a cat who doesn’t particularly like me, and my ever loving partner in crime, my husband. I felt an overwhelming need to connect. With what? I don’t exactly know, but since I had always enjoyed writing, I thought blogging was the next logical step in our digitized culture. Most of my earliest posts are, for lack of a better word, pretty lame. There are a couple that I’m still fond of, but mostly they lacked focus, and I often times tried to sound grander than I actually am. Part of my distaste for these antecedent musings laid in the silly name I had chosen.

Source

Since I’m not a food blogger (and won’t ever be), the whole “Underbelly” concept no longer applied. It’s been so long since I read “Notes from the Underground” that I really don’t remember much of it, and so now the reference just seemed pretentious. Plus, apparently there was a terrible short lived sitcom of the same name. So I looked to one of my constant sources of inspiration, William Shakespeare. Add to that my aforementioned love of quotes, and of course Hamlet comes to mind. The full quote is “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." In the second scene of the second act, Hamlet himself says this to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a conversation about perception. Ah yes. Perception. Something I both struggle with and embrace. As The Bard maintains in this scene, we are the ones who assign worth to our world. Things themselves hold no intrinsic values. We are not victims of circumstance, we are our own circumstance. We qualify our lives and events ourselves, and it is only we who can control how we see them. "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (also Act 2, scene 2). Does this perfectly sum up some of my ideas as to what is often both the problem and solution to all of life's problems? Yes, it does. Does it bother me to once again ride the word coattails of someone else? Not at all.

And moreover, what does any of this have to do with a graphics editing computer program? Absolutely nothing.

All this soul searching did was allow me to settle on a new name, which led me to thinking that my blog needed a more eye catching banner. So I sat down one night, and with much trial and error, trudged my way through GIMP and came up with the simple little image you see above you. I even learned how to download fonts from the internet. In the interest of full disclosure, I did not draw that acorn myself, as I was more concerned with getting the process of making it all work in the first place. I will draw my own acorn soon and replace it. For now, it’s simple and clean, just as I wanted, and I hope you all enjoy it. 

Another thing I taught myself in GIMP was how to combine multiple pictures into one progressive image like so:

Ghost of a Dog

I needed to do this in order to further the documentation of my painting "journey." Which, although I loathe how corny that sounds, I also need to make. I’ve never really gone into it too much, and really it’s a topic too convoluted to give the necessary attention to now. Long story short - about twelve years ago I completely stopped being a visual artist. I didn’t draw, or sculpt, or anything anymore. Part of the problem was my feelings that I was inferior, not good enough, part of it was meeting my husband and being happier than I’d been in a long time. I felt that I didn’t “need” art anymore to get my feelings out. Looking back now, I realize that I had let my perceptions of life and my abilities get the better of me. I’m changing my outlook now. I’m teaching myself to paint, which I never really did before. I’m learning how to do it. I’m practicing even when I get discouraged. I’m embracing the strategy that I am the king of my infinite space.

You know what's kind of funny? I starting writing this on a Friday, with the intention of getting up on Saturday morning and, as per usual, having some time to myself to finish it. I thought that would be ideal and wonderfully apropos. However that didn’t happen this week. My husband got up when I did, and instead of my normal solitary coffee intake, we sat on the back deck, drank our joe together, and talked about the LIBOR scandal…and gardening…and Harry Reid…and insects. Maybe I’ll tell you all what I found out this morning in another entry. For now, I’ll stay content in the hope that maybe you’ll want to learn it, and that maybe I'll be a part of that.

UPDATE: Since writing this, I've changed the blog name yet again. Sorry, I'm quite indecisive at times. I'll write something soon to explain the new name, but know that everything I said above about perception and thought are still tenets that I hold dear.

Also, I've decided to post more art on tumblr instead of hashing out the "journey" on here. You can check out my art here!