Just thinking out loud...
It just occurred to me that I'm never bored. I have a mind that does not know boredom. Sure, I might get impatient to do something else if I'm stuck sitting around for five or six hours in an airport, but I never actually get bored.
I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because I read so much as a child, or maybe it's because I love solving puzzles so much. One of my favorite things to do is look at a machine and figure out how it works, or how I would make a machine to do the task if it's so enclosed that I can't get any clues to the architecture of the device. I can always find some problem to entertain myself with.
Which leads me to another question: what makes my mind work like it does? What makes me better at solving mechanical puzzles or grasp physics intuitively in ways that others don't? What makes math come to me in a snap? I know why I have a good grasp on the English language (don't laugh; I don't make a huge effort here because this blog is supposed to be relaxing, not grammar practice), and that is because of reading, plain and simple.
In the last 14 years or so, there was not a period of more than a day when I was not reading a book. I was never the type to read more than one book at a time, nor do I understand those who do. I suppose it depends on what sort of book it is and whether or not it's a school assignment, but I can't imagine reading more than one work of fiction at once. I'm currently reading the Chronicles of Narnia and Don't Shoot the Bastards (Yet), but that doesn't count: the former is a fantasy anthology, whereas the latter is nonfiction book on, essentially, civil disobedience. I highly recommend both.
Something else I have stuck in my mind that most people I know don't have is the find-it-out compulsion. If I don't know something and I'm at the computer, I look it up right away. If I'm away from an information source (I count my father as an information source because he has the same compulsion and 34 years more of asking questions than I do) I file it away in the back of my mind, and at some point over the next several days--either right away when I get to a computer or when I happen to remember, it varies--I look it up. I've often thought I should carry a pad around with me to write stuff down, like words I don't know the meaning of or how something is made (or anything else, really), but I never got around to it. My memory serves me well, but I'd imagine I lose about 10% of the things I want to look up without writing them down.
That reminds me, a bit of advice I wanted to give the world: Do not read beyond a word you do not understand. That means when you hit a word you don't understand, look it up! Now, I don't take a really hard line view on this, but I think an excellent idea is for a reader to keep a pencil or highlighter or whatever on hand and write down the offending word or mark it in an obvious fashion, to come back to later. It's pretty inconvenient to stop reading and find a dictionary, but in the long run expanding your vocabulary in that fashion is one of the best things you can do. Of course, you might sound like a snob to less educated folks, like I feel I do sometimes.
Sometimes I think of some really random shit to find out. For example (and I don't recall how the topic came up) my father and I were talking about pipe in the car, and he mentioned seamless pipe, which neither of us could really figure out how to make economically. There are obvious, highly wasteful methods of making a tube or pipe without a seam; take a chunk of bar stock and machine it. I offered a solution that depended on them not really telling the truth, which would be welding the pipe closed like usual and subsequently treating the metal in a fashion that removed the impurities of the weld (ie, heating it to cherry red and letting it air cool), leaving the metal for all intents and purposes seamless, but that's not how they do it. I didn't think it was, but it was a plausible solution, just not the correct one.
We talk about mechanics a lot, because after all he is a mechanical engineer. Or politics. Or, more recently, about out West or how my uncle built his house. I used to read in the car, but for the last few years I've found myself talking to my parents a lot more and almost never reading unless the whole family is in the car and I'm left to my own devices in the back seat.See, what they really do is take a billet and roll it at high compression between two rollers at a 10 or 15 degree angle (I don't remember exactly, I just skimmed the thing; I'm betting 10 degrees). The tensile forces crumble the center of the billet and you end up with a hollow, elongated piece of pipe without any seams. Cool. The site I read that on said you could replicate the process by taking the eraser off the end of a pencil and putting a ruler on it at the prescribed angle, pressing down hard, and rolling, making sure to maintain the angle. I didn't actually do it, but they said it would leave you with an elongated eraser with a hole in the middle. Like I said, cool.
I'm not sure what the point of all this is except to explore possibilities by writing about things; as I said yesterday or the day before, this writing helps me think. Because I feel like I'm trying to explain things to someone, even if nobody reads this, my mind works on a slightly different plane. Thanks for reading another aimless post as I wandered the paths of my strange mind, if you made it this far.
