NewSc2 | 
08 24th, 2009| 
Ugh… head hurts. Spent most of the weekend watching music tutorial videos, reading jazz theory books, getting frustrated at myself, and finally biting the bullet to turn in a Deep House loop that I was marginally pleased with. (I’m taking a Deep House course online)
I also spent the weekend doing one of my bi-annual (or tri-annual? quad?) room rearrangements. Saw this post on Lifehacker and it inspired me to de-clutter my room, and lower my desk (it’d been adjusted too high). Shit hit the fan (toilet flooded, and laziness settled in), so I didn’t really get my desk back up till about 3am last night (Saturday), and I spent about half of the day today (Sunday) working on my music project. So my “office room” is currently in half-disaster mode, my bed has about 2 weeks worth of old clothes I don’t wear anymore — but! I have a very aesthetically pleasing desk:
which is what really matters. Now I can (hopefully) comfortably zone out in front of my own computer, and not have to deal with finding power outlets and uncomfortable coffee shop tables and chairs. If I could only do something about my internet addiction…
Damnit… where was I.. I always digress. Oh yeah.. remembering stuff (no, that aside wasn’t meant to be ironic).
With all this reading/studying/skill-acquiring I’ve been doing recently, I’ve found myself approaching my brain-enhancements differently. On one hand, I can easily skim through a book and not remember specific details. Hell, I do it with movies all the time — Up was a movie (SPOILER ALERT–SKIP TO NEXT PARAGRAPH) about a boy who hitchhiked with an old man whose wife passed away, and whose dream was to visit a South American waterfall/jungle. Man meets childhood hero, who turns out to be bad, and along the way makes 2 animal friends (this is Disney, after all), and eventually becomes the hero.
Do I remember much beyond that? No, not really.
On the other hand, I never really review my written notes. It helps me remember things, but maybe just in the short-term? Like in college—you listen to the professor, you read, you take notes, you do homework, you take a final—then forget everything. Do you remember your high school foreign language as well as you should?
So I’m thinking I could glean a lot more in a shorter period of time by just skimming over the books and stopping on those “A-Ha!” moments.
… I don’t know where I was going with this, but I’ve been debating how to study recently and keep myself focused. Basically, at the end of a month of studying, I have absorbed some instinct, but it comes so incrementally. I’m better at music, I’m better at photography, I’m better at — whatever. But ever-so-slightly. I’m not sure if this is just the way things go, and I’d like to speed it up.
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I don’t have a sheet next to me of “Everything I’ve Ever Learned” written on it — I just… know things, and do them. Absorbing what you’ve learned into your mind is a very, very strange process.