I’m the worst learner at Medici University. Seriously. I signed up, rezzed my little gazebo studio, wandered around for the first week to a couple of events, then I got distracted and wandered away.
Okay, some of it may have had to do with various aspects of RL distracting me so much that I couldn’t focus on SL. Some of it has to do with my laptop suddenly deciding that half of my favorite sims are going to send me into a downward spiral of lag that will seize control of my viewer and kick me out if I so much as dare to cam around looking for good camera angles.
But even with somewhat valid excuses for not logging in, I’m still the worst learner at MU. I signed up for creative writing, but I’m barely writing. Well, I take that back, I’m writing a lot, but it’s mostly been journaling in notebooks, I’ve been bad about keeping up with blogging. To to remedy this I think I’ll make an attempt to do Ryan’s May 1-2-31 challenge. A blog post every day? Related to numbers? (Which I presume should be in sequence…) Ahahahahahaha! I’m completely insane. But hey, I’ll give it a shot. I want to be a good student who participates in something before the term is up.
Now, of course, I have a month worth of posts to consider and I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’ll talk about. I’ve read a lot of advice about finding your blogging niche, but I’m still adrift here. I think my biggest challenge when blogging about SL is trying to stick to SL topics. I often struggle with whether or not I should blog RL thoughts here because I still see so many people talk about keeping a strict divide between SL and RL, and I find that when I’m not sure what to say I just abandon my thoughts entirely. I really suck at splitting my interests up between different accounts so I have SL here, RL there, music to the left, crafts upstairs, and spirituality down the hall. On the one hand, I enjoy reading blogs that pull everything in, because it’s an extension of people watching for me, and I enjoy writing about whatever pops into my head. But, on the other hand, I know that not everyone wants to read about Every Single Interest you have.
As if trying to figure out what to write about isn’t enough, lately I struggle to figure out my place in Second Life. Sometimes I feel like I cling to SL because my late husband and I shared so many happy adventures there, and I’m not ready to let experiences like that go. I’m beginning to wonder if I keep this blog going because it anchors me to Second Life and gives me a reason to keep going back in world on a regular basis. I still love being in world, I still lose hours just wandering around, or trying on outfit after outfit, but occasionally I feel like I should be doing more, I should be having adventures, I should be taking advantage of all the fun and exciting things people can do in SL,
Maybe I need to stop trying to figure out the right way to do Second Life, and the right way to blog, and just go merrily forward being me, one step at a time.
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Hi Raven. You’re such an amazing, and intuitive and beautiful person, that I feel incredibly cruel taking away something you think you own. Sadly, I apparently have to be the one to inform you that Medici University Provost, Isabella Medici, has declared that there IS NO Worst Learner at MU.
Some people’s circumstances afford them the opportunity to have a nice sized campus presence. That’s great. Everyone appreciates it. But that doesn’t make them a better human being. Nor a better learner. Just about my favorite line in all of theater is from John Bishop’s play _The Trip Back Down_
“You just do what you do and leave it alone.”
More recently MU’s favorite philosopher, Hennessy Youngman, AKA The Pharaoh, shortened that to
“Do you”
I think worrying about how much or how little we’ve done is a waste of time. Apologizing for it is kind of like those old website “Under Construction” banners. Everything is always under construction! We all get it – don’t even worry about having to say it, just DO YOU!
You probably have no idea how much I admire you Raven. Whenever I see you I feel graced by your presence. The ground I stand on feels more real and solid and knowable and worthwhile.
On the 1 to 31, I wouldn’t do it like A to Z, where every one has to be “Z is for Zebra”. You might do some days with specific numbers, but other days the number might just be a title. Sure THIRTY could be the number of vertices in a dodecahedron, or the age you were when something happened, but it could also just be the title of a thought you have about some non-numeric thing.
On mixing RL and SL, I’m mixed. I like the idea of no constraints. That you’ll just post about whatever you feel like. But I also know that to be read, a blog tends to need a pretty tight focus. So IDK. Part of the hope with Medici University is to create a community. The great thing about cyberspace is that it gives so many more people a voice than old, 20th century top-down media ever did. But now we have everybody shouting “look at me” and too busy shouting to ever look at anybody else.
The idea with MU is not that we’re the greatest artists in the world. But that we are a community. I don’t read your blog because you’re “wearing the yellow jersey” but because we’re part of a community. A campus community, a writer’s group, a crit class, whatever community it may be. And in that context, you can do Fashion on Monday, Building on Tuesday, RL Life on Wednesday, Philosophy on Thursday and Politics on Friday. It’s all good.
I probably could have just said that in the first place!
Please ignore everything above. Substitute this:
It’s all good. Do you.
Sometimes I think I blog just because I want to talk about things I like, whether anyone reads these things or not. Of course I’d like to think people want to read what I write, or look at tweets, or follow Flickr posts, etc. etc. and so on, but in my heart of hearts I think the most important thing to me is I say something and put it out there, somewhere, where people can discover it. It’s a form of release: if I don’t write it down then it will bounce around my brain forever and I certainly have enough mind chatter already. Or so my husband used to tell me. 😀
When I started this blog it was an offshoot of Tumblr (because I wanted to play with wordpress themes) and I intended it to be strictly a showcase for pics I take in SL, maybe with commentary about the sim, sometimes with the memes that Strawberry Singh was doing, but really just focused on SL. I think my indecision about what to do with this blog began when I let one of my RL blogs shift to it’s own different focus, and RL suddenly switched gears on me, and I needed to write as therapy. I have other places to do that, of course, but I can be extremely lazy and sometimes I just want to do all the things in one place. Re-learning how to split things up a bit is a good thing for me. Sometimes I think it’s time to make a fresh start on the rl blog because I need to move forward, and let this settle back nicely into my SL tourist blog. Now I’m just thinking aloud and rambling.
My new short term student goal is to try to get at least a couple posts out each week, and also to try to attend at least a couple events and conquer my anxiety about interacting with other avatars (how is it possible that I can enjoy a casual conversation with a stranger in a grocery store, but the thought of talking to someone online strikes terror in my heart?) I’ve still got a lot of things I should be doing in RL that I have been avoiding and putting off and stressing over, so I know I’m not a bad learner, just a somewhat distracted one. But I am extremely glad to be at MU. And Vanessa, I am so glad to know you! ♥
Hi Raven,
I was going to post “No worst learner” at MU, but Vanessa already has much more eloquently. So welcome back! I am looking forward to reading some posts on the May Challenge.