Making Smarties

Here is one of my biggest problems. I am interested in everything. I mean fucking everything. I am interested in history, evolution, bike repair, language, astronomy, meditation, music, information technology, psychology, sociology, insects, politics, everything. Even the things I'm not interested in... I'm still sort of interested in knowing more about. Like cars and real estate.

Not only is it impossible for me to know everything, but for whatever reason, I'm fairly lazy and prone to anxiety whenever I neglect another form of knowledge or task for too long. For example, a few months ago I wanted to reteach myself high school math like algebra and trig. I wanted to get into calculus, too. Math is a fear I desired to conquer. So I bought an algebra book and worked halfway through it before I became distracted by... well, life, I guess. After two or three months of letting the book sit untouched, I revisited my previous work and found I remembered almost nothing. I plan to re-familiarize myself with the material but I'm caught up in other interests at the moment. That disappoints me a bit.

I am performing an experiment. I'm two weeks into it, actually. What I'm doing is I am taking on several subjects simultaneously in small increments. The subjects I picked are ones that when I visualize 10 years into the future, I want this information at the ready. I am currently attacking three subjects. Spanish, astronomy, and vocabulary. Whee! I'm in middle school! Spanish is a 15 minute per day event. I've got my numbers down and I'm plowing through basic grammar. I have astronomy flash cards by which I will learn a card every other day or so. I will review what I have learned every day by quizzing myself. Finally, I made some vocab cards. I will learn a new word every day and try to incorporate it into conversation or writing. Does that sound egregious to you? I should hope not.

My hope is that learning in smaller, more concentrated doses will allow me to retain the new information for longer periods of time without getting burned out. I can afford 15 minutes a day to learn that la moto is feminized even though it ends with a masculine vowel. I'm already discovering that routinely quizzing myself with flash cards is an effective way to study. If you run into me, ask me how much the Hubble telescope weighs. I will blow you with knowledge. Blow you away, I mean.

Learning revitalizes me and builds up my self-confidence. If I administer learning 'shots' every day, perhaps I will see some positive results beyond information retention.