Podcasts
I’ve always been an avid public radio listener. Now it is now pretty acceptable, maybe even a little cool, but possibly wasn’t as cool when I would arrange my Saturdays in college so that I could listen to the This American Life broadcast. Such arrangements are no longer necessary thanks to podcasts, even weekly shows can be consumed freely and in bulk.
I like to listen to stories more than music while I work on projects like quilting or editing photos. Audiobooks are the best, as they continue on for ages, but it’s an expensive habit and I usually consume my one allotted book per month in no time. So podcasts it is. I’ve listened to nearly every This American Life at this point and it’s really time I broadened my horizons.
I love Radiolab. It’s a great mix of storytelling, history and science. The episodes stick with me. I think about this one about the silence and darkness of space often.
Another recent favorite is Night Vale Radio. It’s fun to follow along with the absurdity of this fictional, supernatural town. I’ve just burned my way through all the episodes and am impatiently waiting for more.
Next on my list to check out is Sawbones. Exploration of misguided medicine? Count me in!
Podcasts have really exploded in the past year or so and I love it. Even friends are starting their own podcasts. I’m looking for new material though. What are your favorite podcast?
past lives
I’ve spent the past few days sick in bed. It’s been awhile since I’ve been so laid out that I couldn’t remotely function. The strangest part was not having complete control over my mind. Everything was foggy and slow, especially words. Mostly though it was utterly boring. Unable to do the things I wanted and unable to sleep, I just laid there, watching tv and movies, most of which couldn’t really hold my limited attention.
I did manage to watch the new COSMOS, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe it was just the mentions of Sagan and the Voyager, or the story of little Neil deGrasse Tyson being extended such kindness by a great scientist, but the show really got to me on an emotional level. I’ve been fretting a lot recently about the destruction us humans have wrought on our planet and it was nice to see the bigger cosmic universe for a moment and feel small in both time and space. Not that it lets us off the hook but sometimes you just need a different perspective and a little relief.
Humans spend so much time looking forward or looking back. It’s not easy to be in the present when there is so much ahead of us and so much that we’ve left behind. I’ve been thinking a lot about roads not taken recently, mostly in terms of art. It is a topic I come back to often, having been trained as a painter and with my film studies through the lens of video art and critical theory rather than by way of story plotting and pitching scripts. I gave up painting at some point. It’s something that I occasionally feel sadness about. A tiny death to make space for other things. It’s not like I couldn’t pick it back up, but it’s the one thing that I’ve let go that I do experience remorse over. I consider what that path would have been, every time getting stuck on the fact that it’s painfully difficult for me to try to sell something that I’ve made. Which is pretty much going to be a problem with whatever I do artistically.
It is more comforting to think back on those things that I know how to do rather than those that I do not (I still need to learn to code or this craft or that), or worse the paths not explored (biology would have been a fascinating option). It’s a relief when I’m exhausted by the film industry to think about particular video art pieces that are rarely seen. The thought serves as a reminder that sometimes you just have to keep creating without experiencing any success for a long long time. Or perhaps never. Or perhaps just enough so that a girl in art school can watch a vhs of something you made in the library and never forget it.
photo from NASA, ESA, and D. Gouliermis (University of Heidelberg)
new times
There’s been a lot of talk about what is becoming of blogging these days. It’s been something I’ve been struggling with for the past year, not so much in regards to comments or stats, but rather what I want this space to be and how I’d like to connect to readers. Balancing the personal with more creative stuff can be a difficult space to navigate. For the past year or so I’ve just been pushing forward, trying to do what I’ve always done. Only just in recent months I feel like I’ve figured out a better path for this blog in terms of what I’m comfortable with posting and what might still be interesting. I’m working on it in any case.
I find these days that the blogs I love the most are not the ones that show only pretty things or details on how to make something, but rather the ones that speak to the human experience and discovery in life. I’ve been blogging in this space for five and a half years (and writing random thoughts on the internet for longer still) and I find it increasingly hard to write candidly here. This is something I’m making an effort to change, so there is more substance here.
In any case, I’d love to hear what you think and would love if you wouldn’t mind taking a little survey I put together. Your thoughts on my blog are important to me; you’re the reason I don’t just write in a journal. I want to stay connected with you.
It seems only appropriate that a survey post should have a bathroom selfie as the previous survey I wrote did. This one was from a recent visit to The Autry.
