Does your brain ever just feel HUNGRY? I'm not talking about food. I mean, sometimes I just get ravenously hungry to know something--no, everything--about something. In high school, I went through a phase where I just had to read every book I could find about Napoleon and Josephine, and I probably read 6-10 books (one after the other) about the two of them. Understand, these books were NEVER about JUST Napoleon, but about their relationship, because I found it endlessly fascinating (and still do, to some extent). Now that I think of it, that curiosity might have been piqued by my viewing of the famous painting of Josephine's coronation at the Louvre in 1996. The summer before my senior year of high school. Regardless of what brought on the obsession to KNOW. IT. ALL., that impulse has never truly gone away. When I am gripped by something, I am GRIPPED by it, and nowadays, that can mean searching online, searching library databases, reading voraciously on the subject, and then never really dropping it. I think sometimes people think I know a lot of useless crap (and it's probably true that 90% of what I get out of these books is useless crap), but I know that useless crap because I'm intellectually curious about things, even if it doesn't lead me anywhere but to the joy of learning that useless crap.
Intellectual curiosity is an interesting thing. I know a lot of people that I would characterize as intellectually curious, but I also know more than a few people who simply can't be termed so. It's not a bad thing, I don't think, but it is a very foreign thing to me. I'm not that way, and I get such pleasure from learning things that I really can't imagine not feeling hungry for more. I don't know what it would be like to be in this world and NOT hunger to learn even just a few things, because there is literally too much for me. I'm ravenously hungry, and I can't ever catch up to all the things I want to read about. Hence my bulging bookshelf of books I've not yet read, and my towering stack of library books yet to be read and the feeling that there is always more and more and more. I know I keep using the words "hunger" and "ravenous", but that's because I can't think of better words to describe how demanding my brain can be at times.
I can't imagine turning it off forever, either, though I think I've learned to do it temporarily, and one of the ways I do it is to sew. Sewing allows me to put aside the thinking for one g-d minute and just...do. There's nothing intellectual about cross-stitching. Counting is not intellectual. But it's such a relief and a relaxing thing for me, and I think it's because my brain switches off of its own accord. I like that feeling; I like it almost as much as I do learning. But I do have to make an effort to get to that shut-down place, and there are places I can get there--Disneyworld is one, but other vacations are not, because I'm all about the educational plaque or museum or...ask Sam. My favorite thing about Muir Woods? The educational plaques. That's a true fact. I can't commune with nature unless there's some learning way to do it. It's pretty fucked up, actually. I probably need to shut down more often, and just let go and not think so much. Which is where the protesting comes in, because I like it so much! I just like cramming shit in my head so much.
(That's not to say that I am an intellectual, because I don't really think I am. I don't feel any drive to necessarily USE the stuff I pick up. I really just like knowing it for the sake of knowing it; I was one of those annoying college students who went to learn, and not to learn a career. I'm still kinda that way. I don't care if I never bust out with all the Josephine trivia I know. I just like knowing it's in my head.)
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