Obscure

I check my stats here on my blog, my small corner of the internet, often….maybe so often it’s probably vain… but anyway. It’s awesome to see that people from all around the world visit my blog randomly. I receive hits from Google searches actually, mostly attributed to the fact that I wrote about Stoney Tangewizi and a Cabinet of Curiosities. You can even Google search ‘stoney tangewizi’ and in the 2^nd page of the image search you can see a picture of me with a can of the pop! *sigh*  I can now die happy because I have received my 15 milliseconds of fame…

But this brings me to an interesting point, one that I’ve wanted to expound on for awhile…

I happen to be a dabbler, which happens to mean I feed on shallow-water vegetation with rapid,splashing movements of the bill…er wait, wrong definition. Here’s the right one:  to play and splash in or as if in water, especially with the hands; to work at anything in an irregular or superficial manner: to dabble in literature. That lovely definition comes from Dictionary.com. (One of my favorite websites, I have it bookmarked.)

Obscure and random things generally happen to be my favorite things or things that I’m interested in at least.  When I was a kid, I would go to the library, find a section and a topic and pick out all the books I could find on it, ones that mostly had lots of photos. I went through comic books, cooking, baking, architecture, sculpting, art history, interior design, rock gardens, Japanese gardens, bonsai trees, archery, cake decorating, crocheting, poetry, geography, travel, and whatever else you can imagine. I would get interested in a subject obsessively for a short period of time and read as much about the subject as I could. 

I think there should be a name for that, like, a SuperLearner or something. I would completely immerse myself into the subject and exhaust all the resources I had to learn about it. I would not only read about it, but I would actually participate some as well. I took an archery class one summer, I went to the bonsai show at the Como Conservatory, I visited all the Japanese gardens around the city of Minneapolis, I painted, crocheted, and made small rock gardens.

Ignore the 3inch tall sandals, I thought they were cool 

I know all of those things aren’t necessarily obscure and unknown, but I don’t think a normal person researches everything they can possibly find out about it. It still continues to this day, I’ve tried skydiving, kayaking, karate, step aerobics, cake decorating, speaking Spanish, surfing, fishing, traveling, sewing, bicycling, hiking, swimming, camping, writing, bowling, horseback riding, kite making, collecting, ocarina playing, bird watching, paintball, rock climbing, and so much more. If you haven’t noticed by now, I also like to write lists.

So the point to all this…It’s not to brag about how awesome I am because I like to try so many things, or to let everyone know I’m famous in my own small world because of liking a certain carbonated beverage… no the moral of the story is, I’m obsessively curious about random things, and it seems awkward and strange sometimes. Yet, variety is absolutely necessary, it’s not that I just like to explore other things, it’s that I MUST. Curiosity is necessary food to me.

That's one reason why I write this blog, because somehow there's tens and tens of you who read what I write, no matter what it's about. I can slip into looking at other people's lives and thinking they are so much more exciting than me because they do x, y, and z. So I just need to embrace who I am and my strange interests. So who knows? Maybe that person from Denmark will check my blog again and read about national kumquat appreciation day, or that stranger from Uganda will read my praises of yogurt cups.

We live in a massively large and strange, beautiful, amazing world, and I’m just contributing to the weirdness of it all.