sunday morning reflections

sunday morning finds me leisurely looking through pinterest, facebook, my flipboard blog feed and the new york times on my li'l iPad. husband always gets up and makes tea and delivers a cup, milky and sweetened with honey, so i don't have to leave the warmth of the quilts. the cats curl up next to me, purring and jockeying for position and it's pretty much my favorite hour or so of the week.

if i view the world through the lens of my various feeds, i have learned that vladimir putin has some canny editorial writers, we can no longer use the words lame, crazy or insane, disney has been infiltrated by the illuminati, the reason that time magazine didn't put putin on the cover in the US this week (he was on the cover everywhere else) was because the media is controlled by 6 corporations, sweden is awesome, there are a lot of injured, homeless animals in need of homes, iowa beat iowa state (i surmised this more from the silence of certain iowa state folks in my feed), people think it's homemade if you combine 4-5 premade ingredients (cake mixes, oreos, cool whip, jello and tortilla chips), eating the resulting sweet dessert will likely bring you closer to jesus, there is major flooding in colorado, berlin is where all the cool stuff takes place, triangles are the new circle, autumn is upon us, the latest trend in photographing food is to place it against a dark background, which serves to make it more moody and poetic and according to my myers-briggs profile (ENTP), i am sirius black from harry potter. 

i do wonder what effect this melange of input has on me? does it connect new synapses in my brain or reinforce the old ones? are my horizons expanded or narrowed? do i end up feeling helpless about my ability to do anything about the state of the world? do I even have the first clue about what state the world is in? does it take away my desire to argue against the madness before i even begin? am I even allowed to call it madness (that illuminati thing is pretty out there)? is it all a load of bullshit?

i listened to a pretentious panel of "experts" yesterday on P1 (our NPR equivalent, only even better) debate the ability of individuals to live more sustainably in practice. they justified their purchases of non-organic food, designer bags, frequent airplane travels, long showers and wasting of energy with homes filled with electronics they never turn off and ended up concluding that we as individuals cannot do anything about living more sustainably. we might as well load our grocery cart with cheap chicken and sit in front of our enormous flat screen televisions, clad in prada, planning our next holiday in bali. they decided that we should wait for governments to wake up and regulate us, since we were too lazy to take steps ourselves.

and while that's a pretty dire and cynical conclusion, and it rather pissed me off when i heard it (as i was driving instead of biking, no less) upon reflection, i don't think it's that illogical in light of the input we feed in to our brains. a lot of what we read and expose ourselves to points to individuals not being able to make one iota of difference (after all, the illuminati and those 6 corporations are controlling everything). and i'd like to say that it's lame and crazy of us, but apparently that avenue is now closed as well.

also in my various feeds, i came across a guardian piece by jonathan franzen about our frustrating way of conducting ourselves in the modern world. he harkens back to an austrian intellectual, karl kraus, who was  blogging in a journal called the torch, before blogging was invented. maybe we need to do as kraus did, and spend a lot of time reading stuff we hate, so as to be able to hate it with authority. i'll admit i'm not good at that, as i blogged the other day, i've been turning off those who post the most objectionable stuff on my facebook feed, because i don't want their vitriol polluting my mind or messing up the steady stream of photos of kittens and lego minifigures. 

i think i've said it before, but we have to start fighting back. we've been slacktivists long enough. it's time to start arguing against the madness. because not doing so clearly isn't working.

tune in and tune out

funny that i read frank bruni's column on how our devices help isolate us from the world on the same day when a facebook friend posted a shockingly racist and downright nasty post about president obama. it was supposedly written by a black journalist, which supposedly made it all better. it didn't. and i hid it from my feed, not wanting my world and my mind poisoned with such absolute vitriol and frankly, utter bullshit (the tea party crap about michelle not loving her country and obama being a communist). it crossed my mind to unfriend that particular friend.

i hide other posts on my feed - graphic pictures of kitties in need of eye medicine and scarred, wounded pitbulls in shelters. i don't want to see those things. i want cute pictures of healthy kitties and cake and scrubbed children on the first day of school and hilarious videos of clever bulldogs that can go get the milk out of the refrigerator. it's this curation (tho' i hate that word) of the content of the world around us that bruni is talking about. we narrow all of the information coming at us down to just what we want to see, rejecting anything that's of a differing opinion or world view than the one we already have.

i think this selecting is something we do instinctively to survive the onslaught of information coming our way. we don't go to facebook or twitter to hear good arguments or have our minds changed about anything, we go to relax, have a chat, check in on what's going on among our friends. it's today's telephone call. my friends or the pages i follow sometimes share something that opens my eyes or causes me to learn or think in a different way (the links below came to me via facebook pages i follow), but mostly, i laugh at wrongly attributed quotes, pithy aphorisms and photos of that poor grumpy cat. it's facebook, after all, not a paris salon in 1913.

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check out these amazing photos of the burning man festival in the nevada desert.

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if libraries are over, why do we keep building spectacular new ones?

maybe they're not so over.

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milk vodka?

blogs are being diluted by other social media

friday, i wrote a little ditty about the way that social media has diluted blogging over on across ø/öresund. i'll admit that i am quite guilty of it myself - i share small, ostensibly pithy thoughts on facebook in a way that i would have once shared them here in a random list. my photos go up instantly on instagram, so what i'm doing at a given moment is documented there. twitter, i use mostly to share links to blog posts and my instagram photos, but i don't hang out there much. i'd like to use google+ more and i use it to save links to things that i want to find again, because i've learned that you can't depend on facebook for that, with all of their "improvements" coming along and preventing you from seeing more than just what they deem the highlights of your own timeline. but it wasn't my intention to recap that post here...

as i visited molly's blog in order to link to her below, i stayed and caught up. because i've gotten horrible myself about properly reading all of the blogs i once loved. this is partially because people are writing less often and partly because i interact with molly regularly on facebook, so i don't have the same need to click in to see what she's said on her blog because i feel like i know what's going on with her (to the extent that facebook reflects what's actually going on in people's lives (that's probably the stuff of a whole 'nother post)). and really, that's silly. because blogs and facebook are not the same thing and there's so much more depth (usually) to a blog post than to a facebook status update. spending some time reading molly's recent posts provoked me to think and feel and reflect in ways that facebook never does (truth be told, facebook doesn't do much of anything other than make me feel passive aggressive). blogging lets us go so much deeper - into our own thoughts, our own psyches, our own patterns and processes - and gives us so much more insight, both into ourselves and others. i guess i needed that reminder. i've got to get more selective with the time i spend with social media.

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this is a bit frightening, but also hilarious:

thank you, molly.

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fascinating little miniature coffins.

i found them through mr. finch. 

who i am not stalking. nuh-uh.

there's a bit more about the little coffins here.

back to basics

i remember a time when i rushed to my blog to share every stray thought that excited me. or to share all of the good links i came across in the course of my day. things like this - the whole voynich manuscript, online and available for your perusal - maybe you'll be the one who cracks it!

but my blogging is diluted these days by other venues - primarily facebook, but also pinterest (for the pretties i used to share), google+ (where i put links to articles and websites that i want to find again - does anyone bookmark in a browser anymore?), twitter (for the quickie shares that reach a different audience than those i put on facebook). not to mention instagram (i'm julochka there too, look for me) (tho' i mostly post all my instagram photos to FB, twitter and flickr as well). it's all very diluted. and i think i don't want it to be. i want this to be the space which serves as repository of the things which interest me at a particular moment - my memory, if you will. i'm not sure when it changed or how or why, but it did. and i'm going back (well, not entirely, as i do like pinterest as a format - it's what i always wished flickr could be - a place to categorize and save pretty and inspiring images and be able to find them again). and speaking of flickr, is it dead yet? i use it only for my 365 project and as a place to easily retrieve instagram photos for use in blog posts. but i want my blog to be where i store my memories and my thinking and well, my brain. somehow i got away from that.

thoughts like these:

~ what if the voynich manuscript was just someone's art journal and they wrote it in a language of their own, so no one could read it?

~ is handwriting inherited? in my own handwriting i see shades of my dad's and my aunt's. is how i write (scrawl, scribble, whatever you want to call it) mandated there in the very architecture of my hand?

~ this is very interesting - niels peter flint on micro living:



i'm clearly not thinking big enough.

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and as for pinterest, i've decided to share some highlights here. i currently have 98 different boards on pinterest. here are the ones starting with a: art journal/collage and atmosphere. check them out, i guarantee you'll find pretty, inspiring things.