Day 274 - Surprising Reflections

A friend tonight told me that she's been reading my posts over on Podcasting For Machine Knitters.  I was surprised, because I didn't know that anyone local ever read anything I wrote. (I'm declaring that Facebook does not count here.)  Over the weekend, I had told my best friend that in the span of a few weeks, I had gone from very random posts on my own blog over the past two years, to entirely different posts on two blogs.  We were chuckling about it, because although I am a voracious reader, in all of the years we have known each other, and all the years we worked together, I have never been known for what I was willing to put in writing.  I was and still am, a heck of an editor, but generally I'm more comfortable at honing/polishing someone else's message. 

M's feedback tonight got me to thinking how surprised my HS senior English teacher would be to see me producing two blog posts a day.  I came insanely close to failing her class for my flat out refusal to submit a journal every week.  Actually I was failing her class when my mother was called in for a parent teacher conference at the mid term.  When she came home the law was laid down, I would submit something, if only three sentences per week, to comply with the requirement that a journal be submitted.  So for rest of the year my journal had three entries a week that said "This is stupid." "My thoughts are none of your business." and other pithy phrases in a similar vein.  An entire semester fit on maybe two pages.  Yes stubborn was there from the beginning. 

To my teenaged mind, what she was asking felt like an invasion of privacy.  My daily existence was pretty average, aka boring, and I saw no reason to document it in writing.  (Note I was a photographer.  I spent my entire HS career with a 35mm over my shoulder or in my backpack.  My life was well documented visually.)  I didn't keep a diary or journal in any form.  Never put anything in writing that you didn't want anyone else to see or be able to use against you was my motto.  I shared a room with two younger sisters and privacy was hard to find. There was no way I was putting anything in writing and submitting it to a teacher who might share it with my parents.  Not a prayer.  My friends and classmates poured their thoughts into pages and pages every week.  I ignored the requirement until handed both an ultimatum and a compromise.

Even in college, when I was studying architecture for the summer at Oxford and had the requirement of keeping a sketch journal as part of my grades, I wasn't very diligent at it.  My sketch book had pithy little observations of what I was visiting, or at most extremely sketchy drawings and a running list of the rolls of film I had shot, the date, location and type of film.  It wasn't until half way through the term, when I had to do a presentation on something, and produced a very focused series of photos to illustrate my points, that my professor realized that what he had been requiring in the sketch book, documentation of our observations of the architecture/spaces/built environment we were visiting, I was doing with my camera.  Truth is I was simply more focused on capturing what I saw around me on film, which I always felt let me document far more things in my limited amount of time, than I could every capture in my sketch book.  I shot about 70 rolls of film that summer. 

I have long joked that generally when I need to explain something that it's generally a visual thing.  I admit to being both a visual and tactile learner.  And to this day, even though this post doesn't really show it, I prefer to convey my ideas visually rather than purely verbally.

OKC - cast on the purple yak.  The fabric so far seems a bit drapey.  Need to get a larger sample to accurately assess.  The cold weather has also encouraged me to restart the NZ sweater.  If nothing else it warms my lap.  Yes I more than accomplished my eleven for the day.