Learning is My Supercrack
I can't claim that line - that's from the fingers of the marvelous Mike Kabongo this morning, when we were chit-chatting in Gary Poole's unending thread #forthecookies. It's too much to tell, let me sum up. There's a bunch of us that use this lengthy facebook thread as a hang-out spot. We mostly seem to be nerdier than most, so there's often references to the obscure. This morning, Mike accused me of being profligate with Idun's apples.
Which meant I had to look that up, since I didn't recognize the reference. And any day that starts off with learning something is a good day. I thanked Mike, and he came back with the line I stole for my blog today.
It really is, you know. There's a rush I get from learning, acquiring new knowledge, and passing it on, too. There are times I can't do anything with it. I can't think off the top of my head what I'd do with knowing an obscure Norse goddess was known for bringing eternal youthfulness to other gods through apples (or fruit, but apples works as shorthand). On the other hand, I do write mythology-based young adult fiction, and this poses an intriguing bit of story to tell.
It's not just research for my books. No, wait, it's all research for my books. Even when I'm working on learning stuff for my career in science, it can still be useful for the books. I'd say I aspire to write hard science fiction, but honestly I aspire to write squishy, stinky, and occasionally contagious science fiction. I've been reviewing my molecular techniques skills, and there's just something about the word 'mutagenesis' that sparks the story for me.
Any day I can learn something new is a good day. I have a trivial mind, as a result, full of small snips of seemingly unrelated information. Most of it, I don't recall any longer how I picked it up, which is why I tend to check and double-check what I think I know when writing. Blindly accepting what's in my head is no bueno. I did this yesterday, when I realized that although I had in my mind that I needed a sealed copy of my transcript, I might not... so I asked. Turns out, it's very unlikely I'll ever need a sealed one. So I unsealed it, scanned it, and have it all ready to send out when it is requested.
Blindly accepting what you 'know' that ain't so is bad. We see that almost daily on the news recently. Faced with memes that confirm their internal biases, people froth themselves into frenzies. Over easily disproven lies and half-truths. It is infuriating. I've gotten to the point where I see a headline and assume that if I dig into the source material, what's actually going on is likely the direct opposite of what the headline claims. it doesn't help when people decide to play fast and loose with language, as I talked about yesterday in my guest post.
Having started my day out on a high point, i mean to keep going, and learn more! I noted a new video on Epigenetics is waiting in my youtube queue to be watched, and that fits my scheduled house-cleaning and dragon-making time. It's a good day to learn. I'm high on caffeine and education, what a rush!