the place for thinking

I've been a rotten blogger for months now.

I kept meaning to post something, but somehow never got around to it.

I was going to write something about my great-aunt (who's doing fine* now and my sister is living with her, an arrangement that seems to be working out for both of them).

I was going to write something about commuting, now that I take BART to work every morning.

I was going to write something about observing more black women with straightened and colored hair recently than I've seen (or noticed) for years.

But the thing that got me to open up the old Blogger account is Errol Morris' set of essays on Fenton's two photos of an empty road in the Crimea. He starts out trying to establish in what order a pair of photographs were taken and goes on into thoughts about war, about intention, about how you figure things out. Nikita Khrushchev even shows up (so to speak) in the second section. It's fascinating reading and I've taken to reading some of his other essays in his Zoom columns on the NYT website. It's a lot of food for thought and so it's getting late and even though I'm getting over an awful cold and should be in bed, I keep reading.

Because it's fun to think about this stuff.

I am rediscovering the pleasure of thinking about things that have no immediate use. I have always loved this. But I had sort of stopped for quite a while. Somehow having a job that, though it uses a lot of mental energy sometimes, is not overly intellectual has freed me up for the not-so-simple pleasures of thinking.

You would have thought being in academia would have done that. I think it does it for a lot of people. But it didn't do it for me. In part, I think it was because that was what I expected university life to be like (too many movies, probably). But I think it's also because this thinking thing has always been about fun for me and once something gets past the fun part to the work part, I don't so so well.

I'd say that mentally, I'm a sprinter rather than a marathoner. I have to trick myself to do things that take longer than 20 minutes** to complete. I have a lot of tricks now, switching between tasks, promising myself some sort of treat if I stick to it for another ten minutes, and so on to get things done. Often enough the tricks work and I end up spending an extended period of time working without feeling bored or trapped, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

So for me thinking is, at it's best, a ludic activity.

Which also might explain why I haven't blogged in months. It's felt too much like work and I hate working. But maybe it's going to feel like play again.

* well, as fine as you can be at 93+ years old.

** ok, I exaggerate, longer than a half hour.