I've been tidying up my internet experiences lately. I'm a news junky. Esepcially a science, tech and politics news junky. I'm fascinated by where the world is going and by just about every country on the bus. I could spend all day on the internet, reading, watching, searching and surfing and never get around to doing anything on the productive side of intellectual intercourse. I wouldn't be alone, but I would feel a little lonely. Maybe a little like a lurker or a peeping Tom... always interested in other people's stuff but very unwilling to have that interest made public. Definitely a lonely approach to information and community.
In real life I don't often say a lot in groups, but I do let people know I'm there and listening or at least thinking about something that might be helpful to the conversation or meeting or whatever. I don't generally say a lot because whatever it is I might have to say might not be immediately relavent or even apparently connected, but on the web and in other circles of communication I'm almost entirely a lurker/consumer. I have trouble getting back to people via email, or even emailing them at all. Blogging seems to be a major effort, even though when I actually sit down to write an entry, it just seems to flow out. I almost never post comments anywhere. As such, when one searches for my name in Google, you find real, communicative participation in the world from me only really from the 1990s. My younger self, of course was busy filling it's head and heart with all the idealism and cutting edge causes of the time, highly interested in participating with hardly a care for what might in fact be contributed. Probably a good thing, but not something that works for me now. I'm pretty unlikely to offer my any advice without a good dose of qualifying or disclaimer. I've taken uncertainty and doubt into the very core of my being and while I'm still an unreasonably prideful man, I have an almost fossilized doubt in my heart about what I can do and what I really know. Which is why I read.
I read every day. I read and read and read. I almost never write about what I read for the reasons mentioned above, but there's hardly a subject I haven't read something about. This wide breadth of interest, perhaps it's even neurotic, makes me a bit of what are called Otaku in Japanese. It's a double entendre playing upon the highly formal form of adressing someone "otaku-sama" and a polite word for house "otaku". They have different kanji, but sound almost exactly the same, with only slight variations in tone (grammatically speaking non-existant) to differentiate the two meanings. Context, context, context as usual. Anyway, the idea is that people who are media junkies, never leave their house (otaku) and so they don't know anyones's name, so they have to be extra polite and refer to others as (otaku) instead of using their names. This supposedly emerged in the mid-late 1980s, but I'll throw in a little disclaimer here and say "or so I've read".
Having been described as an otaku with somewhat greater frequency lately, I've taken it upon myself to wrench myself away from my computer and books, foisting more of my Japanese study upon unsuspecting university students standing at stoplights, trying to decide if they will acutally cook a full fish or whether they should just go with the personal sushi, or waiting in line at the drug store. Now I make an effort to get out with my flash-cards, making up ridiculous or vulgar stories to fit the word sounds and meanings and experiment with sentence forms with the kind help of those surprised Japanese kids. Just as a note, what seems funny to us in English as word-play usually doesn't translate into humour, just confusion and strangeness.
Anyway, even though I'm getting out more now that it's spring and I've decided to lose the Otaku moniker, I really wanna read news and new web pages etc. So what's a body to do?
Well, I happened upon this
site and got some good ideas. I love tech fixes, drastic fixes and new stuff, so I quite enjoyed them. You can't be an expert on everything. Hell, she says you can't even keep up with everything. I'll tell you she's right. Keeping up with one or two things as well as a social life and health is a struggle of monumental proportions. I guess it fits with my April post. Simple, fewer choices and greater happiness/effectiveness etc. Still, for me, simple really does feel very strange. Although I've been finding simple to be much more fun and happy, complexity is so much more
interesting. Life's a balance...
