I settled in to do some reading this morning, and in a strange serendipity Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” came on my iTunes. It’s weird, but at this particular point in my life I actually do know where it has been going. I’ve been teaching in a fairly stimulating way (for me at least—as for the students, the jury is always out until the bitter end) and taking classes that for the most part are stimulating as well. There have been good lectures, meetings, etc. And at the end of the day when I come home, I really haven’t felt like writing. Or reading (outside of my research interests).
Most of my spare time has been spent staring lengthwise through a variety of fish tanks. It’s oddly peaceful. This morning, as I was trying to figure out how to squeeze in “just one more” tank (under threat of divorce), it dawned on me what the attraction was. Building and landscaping aquariums is like constructing a little world. Not a fictional world (for me, at least), but an actual one. Aquariums are small, but they are more interesting to me when they mirror the real.
I’ve drifted away from “virtual” spaces, and it becomes hard to sustain an interest in the goings-on in the online world. But I never really conceived of this blog as a “social” space—only a public one. I wish I had more time to take notes here about the things I’ve been stimulated by—I’m going to try to persevere on that front. But “social software” never really has interested me all that much. Though learning is frequently “virtual,” I really don’t think that it is exclusively “social.”
