Learning to love my scatterbrain.
A few days ago, I watched ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, a documentary about the life and times of a well known music critic, Ben Fong-Torres, who wrote for Rolling Stone Magazine since it’s very start.
A great watch by the way.
Then, while listening to one of my favorite podcasts, You’re Wrong about with Sarah Marshall, I learned about someone named Nona Willis Aronowitz. Immediately this sent me down one of my infamous, multipotentialite-esque internet rabbit hole adventures.
Turns out, Nona is the daughter of Ellen Willis, the first pop music critic for the New Yorker and one of the few women to break into this predominantly male scene.
It got me thinking, did Ellen & Ben know each other? Did their stories overlap somehow?
Turns out they were both music critics between 1968–1975, one in New York city and the other across the country in San Francisco. And they also shared the common thread of being ‘outsiders’ in the predominantly white male club of writers and critics.
I wonder if they knew about each other?
I love these threads of connection.
Which leads me to wonder, how many of these threads are simply the work of algorithms? Is there still such a thing as serendipity and coincidence?
Maybe it’s that 6 degrees of connection thing I’ve heard so much about. It makes sense that these two people would be connected, they both occupied a specific time and place in music history, but how is it that a Podcast I listened to connected with a documentary I watched a few days prior? On two separate, unsynced devices, might I add.
I wonder how much algorithms affect my life.
I’ve listened to snippets of conversations about this phenomenon, how YouTube can send you down a spiral of videos filled with conspiracies and fear fuelled ideologies. The more you click, the more you watch a narrowing view of the world.
Clearly, I’m no expert in this, I have no idea what I’m talking about, so I won’t go too far off on this tangent. Just something I’m thinking about. Either way, I still find pleasure in these threads of connection.
“Don’t get trapped in creating meaning” — Feminist Book Club Podcast host (Ep: Can Fandoms be Feminist?)
Flavor of the week.
As usual, I’ve learned to follow my curiosities, even if they seem random or unrelated to whatever else is going on in my life.
My curiosities feel like little pockets of learning time. I don’t usually intend to professionally pursue whatever I’m geeking out about. Well, it’s not that I don’t pursue them, I do, it’s more about letting go of this idea that they need become my life’s work.
I put so much pressure on myself to turn every new interest into a full time hobby, which then needs to be monetized and turned into a career. I’ve done this with most of my interests.
I’ve spent so much time pursuing this ideal of a career that will finally be fulfilling, exciting and pleasurable. I know work is work, and even the best careers have sucky bits but damn, wouldn’t it be nice to speak passionately about what I give 40 hours of my life to every week?
This is the kind of pressure that’s swirling in the back of my mind, 24/7 and so whenever I stumble upon something that peaks my curiosity, I fall down a rabbit hole, searching what a career in that field could look like. That anxious part of me gets excited that THIS will finally be IT — THIS is the job I’ve always wanted, THIS is the career I’m meant to be in.
The latest ‘flavor of the week’ is antiques. Researching their history, browsing online auction catalogues, learning the lingo, and way too many google searches hoping to dig up some history around an artist, furniture style or glassware.
I’m learning to follow my curiosities while lessening the pressure to turn them into anything more than simple curiosity.
I’m learning to let myself get swept up into their whirlwinds, enjoy the ride and then move onto the next thing when it inevitably comes along.
I have no idea what my curiosities mean, why they come and go, why I seem to have so many or how any of it is supposed to fit into my life, and maybe I don’t have to.
Ahh, anxiety’s a bitch, ain’t it?
Links mentioned
You’re Wrong About Podcast: https://yourewrongabout.com/2019/11/12/about-us/
Episode with Nona Willis: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/porn-wars-w-nona-willis-aronowitz/id1380008439?i=1000574800765
Nona Willis’s website: theothernwa.com
Ben Fong-Torres Documentary: https://tribecafilm.com/films/like-a-rolling-stone-the-life-times-of-ben-fong-torres-2021
