This postWhenever anyone says the word “translate” in my Aeneid class, for some bizarre reason the line “and I’ll translate it into Yorkshire for you, till you get the way of it” (from The Secret Garden) comes into mind. It’s unstoppable.
Watched Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times tonight for my Humanities class. Crazy movie, really — absurd all over the place. But entertaining. And the social commentary was rather interesting.
Just a moment ago, Katherine’s IM status read “yes I will Yes.” When she told me it was a literary allusion and challenged me to guess which book it came from, I jokingly said, “James Joyce, Ulysses.” Now, I’ve never read Ulysses. I’ve read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man twice, five years ago and seven years ago, but that’s it. So imagine my surprise when I turned out to be right — it’s the last line of the book. Crazy. I can’t wait to become a librarian. :)
Speaking of information retrieval, lately I’ve been noticing that I have a tag-based memory, like Flickr or LibraryThing or del.icio.us. For example, when I meet someone, I mentally tag them with where they’re from, what their major is, and marital status. And anything else interesting. This kind of thing comes up a lot in my calling, where I sit outside the bishop’s office during interviews. I get to talk to everyone in the ward several times over the course of the semester (ecclesiastical endorsements, tithing settlement, callings, etc.), and whenever I’m talking with someone I subconsciously retrieve whatever tags I’ve filed for that person. Sometimes I tag them incorrectly, because they were only taking an economics class and weren’t actually majoring in it, but I tagged them “economics” notwithstanding and that’s what stuck. And when I need to, I can run searches on the tags — “find all people tagged ‘virginia’”, for example, or “find all people planning to go to law school.”
I’m rambling. I bet most everyone’s memory is like this. I’d just never thought of it in a Web 2.0 context.
I need sleep. :)
