Hunger for knowledge and the gluttony of the mind

Posted by Beth Dylan on Mar 16, 2009 in Blog, Introspection | 2 comments

When you’re first getting to know someone, it’s common to ask your new acquaintance what interests them. This is a chance to either realize you’re dealing with a vapid nitwit (I’m only using that word because I learned its etymology today and I got excited about it) or some superdeep well of information. Whenever I’m asked the question of what sort of things interest me, I’m likely to pause, reflect, and respond brilliantly with “Uh, I dunno… Stuff?”, which runs the risk of turning me into a former prospective intellectual peer of  the asker. The most readily available excuse for my brain constipation is that all my thoughts are bottlenecking and can’t get out in an orderly fashion and causes me to act a fool, which happens regularly, I’m loath to admit.

The thing is, I have so many interests that it slows me down on a regular basis. It does literally slow down my web browsing, since I have at least three different tabs at all times. Right now I have fifteen. Fifteen separate and important tabs. The highlights are Wowhead (for quick and easy reference for WoW), a YouTube video showing some kid performing Debussy’s Claire de Lune, my school online class page, two tabs on people mentioned in a book I’m reading, the store for the Human Rights Campaign, the Wiki articles on handfasting and empiricism, an informative guide to the biliteral cipher, and the one I’m using to write this. My internet all but gives up from the strain if I try to surf when I’m playing World of Warcraft. But I’m an information packrat, and I’d be lost if my tab bar was unpopulated by things to help me efficiently procrastinate and learn.

It’s clogging up my family’s DVR as well. My ravenous feeding frenzy fills up the recording device almost to capacity, with varied shows like America’s Next Top Model, History Channel documentaries on Nazi and Aryan culture and Armageddon, Logo channel shows like Ru Paul’s Drag Race and a documentary on transgenderism, movies like Grindhouse or  Shawshank Redemption or Showgirls, and numerous episodes of nostalgic sitcoms. I went from hardly watching TV at all for over a year to recording multiple shows a day on a successful channel-surf session. And it doesn’t help that I have to be in a special mood to watch most of what I’ve recorded, so it’s very easy for it to pile up and cause issues. Just today I had to erase all my Fresh Prince episodes because the DVR was at 90% capacity. Such a shame.

And I’m going to need my own library when I settle into my future home, because a small, finite space like my single bookshelf does little to contain my ever-growing collection of fiction and nonfiction books. I’m such a fatty when it comes to buying new books, I really am. I’m busting out of my jeans, yet I tell the server to keep the cheesecake coming. I was out of space (again) before Christmas, but I filled my wishlist with all sorts of things and got many of them. New additions to my nonfiction collection were Collapse, Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Salem Witch Trials, An Easy Out: America’s Addiction to Outsourcing, Othello’s Children in the “New World” about moors, and The Spanish Civil War. I also got four new novels, I think. And I’m currently reading five books to varying degrees. I’m actively reading Why I Became an Atheist as my primary, the collected works of Jorge Borges when I need a short story here and there, Wolves of the Calla for bathroom reading (working through the Dark Tower series again), Legacy of the Drow (five books in one, I believe, so I read one in between other books I finish), and The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama to a lesser degree since I often forget I’m in the middle of it (I will start it fresh to give it a fair go sometime in the future). My Amazon.com wishlist calls to mind that quintessential “I Love Lucy” episode with the candies on the conveyor belt due to the rate at which I add to it versus the rate at which I buy off it. Pandemonium.

And it would be terrible to neglect to mention all of my other brain babies like how to start a micronation, the virtues of an egalitarian society as embodied by communes, Norse mythology, Maya culture (I can thank my love for the use of a textbook to make it easier to research), the influence of pagan practices and beliefs on Christianity, how to make various kinds of alcohol, advantages and disadvantages of holistic medicine, the Dictionary.com words of the day (“brobdingnagian” is my favorite discovery so far), etymology, and how to work the stock market.

I’m so glad I’m relatively unbound in my life so I can do nothing but read or research for hours on end. I have no idea what I’d do with myself if I actually had a job to get in the way of my desire to compulsively Google anything and everything. But with freedom comes much responsibility, I suppose. I have to rein in my urge to one-click order books online and live at Borders since I don’t have much money flowing into my account. But I’m currently pondering the efficacy of using the stock market (and my not-yet gained ability to make money from it) to give me the financial fuel to accomplish my life goal of being a constant student. And my breadth of knowledge in many different areas would lend itself well to trying my hand at being a freelance writer, too.

The secret to lifelong wealth could possibly be held in any one of my many interests, so I like to use that to rationalize my insatiable hunger for an ever-growing collection of books and browsing tabs. I wonder if there’s a market for a “gister”, that is, someone who can give you the gist of something real quick like. I’d have no problem whoring my brain out in that manner.

So if anybody wants anything neatly encased in a nutshell for them, don’t hesitate to come a-callin’. I could really use the cash.