Today has been a rather lazy day for me – not much accomplished but I haven’t felt particularly bored. I got up at a reasonable hour (8 am), goofed off until around noon, got ready and went to a meeting at the church, came home and goofed off again. Now it’s about 6 pm and my sister will be coming home from work soon wanting to know what we should do about dinner (we still can’t cook in the kitchen) and I haven’t given it any thought. <sigh> What a whirlwind life I lead.
During those copious amounts of time spent goofing off, I was engaged in the computer equivalent of doodling. My sister in Georgia is a master doodler – given a writing utensil (preferably a gel pen) and something to write on and she’s doodling. I’ve been known to doodle a bit myself, but I’m a rank amateur compared to her. Doodling on the computer is very different although the intent is the same – to while away some time without having to engage our brains or body to any great extent.
So, you may ask (or not), how in the hell do you doodle on the computer? Many people probably do this without realizing that they’re doodling – it’s sometimes referred to as “surfing the ‘net”. For this really to be considered doodling, however, you have to have absolutely no purpose in mind. Hours spent looking up resorts for a dream vacation is not doodling – that’s research, even if you don’t intend to take said vacation in your lifetime. To truly doodle on the computer, you have to start looking up one topic – say, resorts – and hours later find yourself looking up something completely different – say, medieval costumes. In between, you must have looked at several unrelated topics, the more the better. You don’t necessarily have to visit multiple websites to engage in doodling. There are at least three sites that I frequent that offer an abundant source of doodling material: Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia compiled by internet users who may or may not have any earthly idea what they’re talking about. I would never use it as a source for my dissertation, but it can be a lot of fun since it contains a multitude of cross-links allowing you to jump from topic to topic without any effort at all. Most of the articles also include a list of sources and external sites to give you some indication of how valid the information you’re reading is, and also give you another place to roam while you’re doodling.
YouTube is sort of the audio-visual version of this. I tend to avoid the “featured videos” but instead search for a topic that makes me think of another topic where a related video triggers yet another topic. This is where I spent most of this afternoon. I wondered if there was anything new about Andrew Johnston (who was a 13 year old contestant on Britain’s Got Talent) which led me to other boy sopranos which led me to the Vienna Boy’s Choir (with a side trip to their official site) which led me to… well I forget now, but I ended up watching video clips of Black Adder for a while.
Facebook is there for social networking but it also offers a plethora of time-wasting quizzes and pages and causes and groups just for the purpose of doodling (I took a quiz that told me that of the Star Trek: Next Generation characters, I’m most like Picard and another that told me that of dog breeds I’m most like a basset hound). Not all of them are stupid – there are some really worthy causes represented and lately they’ve had a thing for polls about some hot-topic social issues, like same sex marriages. I think the key to using Facebook to doodle is that you don’t spend any great amount of time doing any one thing and seldom are the things you do related to one another.
There is another way of doodling on the computer – it’s called blogging. Now, most days I give a lot of thought to what I’m writing about. Today isn’t one of them. I just started writing and ended up here, dragging whatever unfortunate souls happened to be reading along for the ride (assuming they didn’t give up in the first paragraph). While I have a rather lengthy list of useful and productive things I could and should be working on, I choose instead to babble on and on about computer doodling. However, I’ve run out of steam and it’s time to find another outlet for my doodling frenzy. Or perhaps I’ll actually try to work on something from my list of projects. Or not.
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Really enjoy your blog! Hope your kitchen remodel is soon done. Focus on the way it will look - maybe that'll help. (And a trip to Hawaii wouldn't hurt 
by sometime soon 
Thanks for dropping in, sweetness - it was great to see you! 
Take care of that arm, my friend, and talk to the doc if you need to... 
Just wanted to let you know I've subscribed to your blog so I can keep up with you more easily. 
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