🏵️ Daydreaming is Valuable & so are Classics

On the value of personalization, planning, pretend -- and giant tortoises.

Please read the following headings to the tune of On the First Day of Christmas as I continue with this small (dare I say, Tiny?) experiment for helping me stay on top of sharing neat stuff with y’all.

🌼 3 Recent Highlights

The idea of a personal canon isn’t new, but I hadn’t heard the phrase before I stumbled across this wonderful post about curating one from the incredibly insightful

bea

, who also wrote why do we crave useless knowledge? My biggest takeaway was:

In a world constantly pushing you towards the new, popular, and officially endorsed, a personal canon is a way to center what actually matters to you, rather than what’s supposed to matter.

Centering what actually matters to me is incredibly hard. It’s much easier to focus on what I’m good at, what’s immediately rewarding, what’s easy to find, and what other people care about.

One of the things that matters a lot to me is exposing my children to ‘the Western canon’ so they have the context to understand references. So many idioms and turns of phrase are dependent on shared culture, shared context, and a literary tradition that stretches back thousands of years. One of the most valuable classes I took in high school was sports statistics — traditionally considered a ‘blow-off’ class for GPA padding, learning how things like basketball brackets work made it infinitely easier for me — a nerdy girl — to network with normal guys in mainstream places.

So in addition to letting him play Minecraft and Pokemon Go, lately we’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables, which had this wonderful bit that jumped out and slapped me in the face so hard I stopped reading out loud and just stared at the page.

“Oh, Marilla, looking forward to things is half the pleasure of them,” exclaimed Anne. “You mayn’t get the things themselves; but nothing can prevent you from having the fun of looking forward to them. Mrs. Lynde says, ‘Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.’ But I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed.”

This comes up in my personal life pretty often; I am much more of a ‘dreamer’ than my husband. Oh, he looks forward to things, but I make a hobby of imagining what my dream retirement house would look like, or making notes for the perfect vacation — all things we won’t be able to do for years, if ever. For him, those daydreams represent the stress of futile planning. For me, they’re a pleasure in and of themselves.

Make-believe is open-ended play at its most flexible and creative. Anything at all can be used in the service of an idea or fantasy. And it is just this kind of flexible thinking—the pot that becomes a hat one minute, a steering wheel the next—that will serve a child their entire life. Children draw meaning from the world through this play; a lack of it leaves creativity and identity weak. The choices made in fantasy play build a foundation of individuality and guard against a child becoming a passive receptor for concepts and ideas that have been prepackaged for them.

Simplicity Parenting is one of the few parenting books I read that both resonated with me and had useful takeaways — and not just for being a mom. Little kids aren’t the only ones who benefit from taking time away from the hustle and bustle of prepackaged information to just pretend. Some of the world’s most powerful, productive people get their best work done in silence, on walks, away from screens and people, just thinking and letting their minds work and imagine and dream.

🎓 2 Links I Learned From

• This article about the history of the giant tortoise was sad, but also fascinating for anyone interesting in 19th century naturalism, or anyone writing interstellar scifi or survival fiction. Apparently, the giant tortoise was a ‘snackable and stackable’ food source on long voyages. The meat was delicious, and they could store potable water in a special bladder for months without themselves needing food or water to survive. They are literally the perfect seafaring food. Darwin somehow managed to get three of them back to England during his voyage on the Beagle, but it is absolutely no wonder to me that we almost drove them to extinction.

• It seems obvious when you think about it, but people often hide their identity when committing violence. This phenomenon manifests differently in different cultures.

  William Buckner
  discusses several in his notes on the use of homicide costumes, and it gave me a new appreciation for the mythology surrounding ghosts, shapeshifters, and serial killers.

📸 & A Picture From My Office

On the topic of centering useful skills, I’ve decided that although learning more hard science would paper over some of my embarrassment about having done relatively badly in calculus and physics compared to my current peers, knowing calculus won’t help me be better at anything that matters in my real life.

Only a few things seem genuinely worth the time to learn in their own right, rather than being interesting ways to keep my mind agile. I want to learn python, and I want to get more comfortable with git, but those are skills. They require doing in a way that I am often just not capable of at 9:30 at night.

But I usually still have the energy to read, and as much as I enjoy cozy romances and chonky history books, and as much as I try to resist that every moment of every day needs to be productive in some way, I am drawn to the idea of serving my family instead of the algorithm or my own private nerdery. One of us building a house seems more likely than a relative needing to wage war across the Eurasian steppe, so I’ve been dipping my toes into learning more about design and architecture and…

I cannot remember the last time I felt so completely out of my depth. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I find it easier to grasp quantum physics than antique architecture. I wanted to start relatively early in the chronology of American architecture. When I poked around, I found Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky by Clay Lancaster. I figured it would be helpful to start with the kinds of houses I see when I visit historic towns like Shepherdstown and Boonsboro — admittedly they’re not in Kentucky, but I figured it’s Appalachian enough to share context.

I got it in dead tree form because they’re generally better for photo-heavy books, and the ebook was actually more expensive. I sort of regret it, though — there are so many words I don’t understand that I wish it was easy to look them up while I read, the way it is for ebooks.

Even not knowing what an entablature is, or what pedimented means, or where the tympanum area is, though, I found the book useful for helping me reflect on what I like in a house. I don’t know what hipped vs. gabled means, but I know that my priority is avoiding unnecessary joins in a roof, because roof leaks suck. Before my husband and I bought our ‘marital’ home, he had a townhouse, and the roof started leaking right in the middle of a big party. I’ve taken a dim view of Victorian style rooflines ever since.

I didn’t know ‘Victorian’ meant ‘lots of window outcroppings’ before I got this book. I didn’t know a ‘gable’ was the triangle part of a house’s exterior, shaped by the roof — but I’m glad I learned, because now when I read Anne of Green Gables to my son, I actually know where the little girl is sleeping!

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PS: If you have any thoughts on what a ‘perfect custom home’ looks like, or any gotchas or gimmes to share when it comes to architecture, I’m all ears.