One of the few activities outside of school/homework I’ve done lately was attend the PostSecret presentation last Wednesday. I had never heard of it before, but it’s “an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard.” People send things in on all kinds of things to him, including bananas and a whole host of other items, and reveal some sort of secret on the card that they’ve never told anybody else. At the end of his presentation the floor was opened up to people in the audience brave enough to get up to the microphone and tell everyone about something they were willing to share.
Reflecting upon what people were saying got me thinking about some of my own personal secrets and internal feelings. I mulled things over in the back of my mind as I went about life and classes, and eventually just started writing everything I was thinking down. The act of taking partial thoughts and forcing myself to be able to form full ideas on paper from them was certainly an interesting task, especially when I’ve sometimes only half thought about the idea. I started with the original intent of making myself a list of secrets that I have, but it really evolved more into general feelings and thoughts that I have, some that are fairly recent and others that have been evolving and changing shape for a while. At the end of it, I ended up with about three pages of random thoughts in no particular order, but all of which influence the way I act, feel, and generally go about life.
One thing that ended up coming out of the “brainstorming” activity and some thinking since then was the sentiment of the saying “you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone.” My mind may be thinking 1,000 steps ahead and predicting some sort of worst-case scenarios of how that relates to me, but it certainly puts the joys and privileges of life into perspective. Life is definitely not something to speed through. Get out and do things, have fun, sad, angry, fantastic, exceptional experiences, and enjoy everything that other people and things have to offer :)
And your (my) slightly-regular randomly interesting Internet links!
- The end of an era: Internet Explorer drops below 50% of Web usage [arstechnica.com]
- CNET details the death of Microsoft's Courier and Bill Gates' 'allergic reaction' [engadget.com]
- Chart: One Year of Prison Costs More Than One Year at Princeton [theatlantic.com]
- John McCarthy — Father of AI and Lisp — Dies at 84 [wired.com]
- Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse [arstechnica.com]
- When passwords attack: the problem with aggressive password policies [arstechnica.com]
- Japan Pushes World’s Fastest Computer Past 10 Petaflop Barrier
