The Knowledge Monster

Sometimes the urge just hits me: I want to learn everything about everything. Just... just everything.

I think this is why, every couple of years, I seem to pick up a new hobby that is suddenly the most important thing in my life.

Right now I'm jonesing severely to sate my curiosity on a number of subjects:

I imagine this goes along with the cooking thing, but I REALLY want to learn more about spices. Not just pepper and garlic, but the real exotic stuff. Turmeric, cardamom, anise, and... umm... melange. All of it. There's something terribly romantic about spices, and I want to understand 'em all better.

I wanna build a website. For myself. It'd be just like my blog, only better and with more... I dunno... bells and stuff. Eventually, I have a goal to create a webcomig (it's why I'm doing all the drawing). I'd want to run that on my own, though, without a platform like Blogger. So that's a project.

Dude, chocolate? It's cool. Like, really cool. I wanna know more about chocolate. This curiosity's two-pronged: I want to know more about the history, but I also want to learn how to work with chocolate more, a desire that, again, stems from all the cooking I've been doing recently.

Some of my favorite artists do a lot of work with shadows and shading - something I personally don't present well on page. I would really love to take a class just on shading and lighting.

Back when I was in university, I worked on a newspaper archiving project. I spent hours transcribing scans of early Utah newspapers. I frequently came across advertisements for "snake oil" cures - lot's of "Dr. Peabody's Cure-all Tonics." For some reason, the subject has stuck in my mind since then, and now I find myself consumed with curiosity to learn more about the slick malpracticioners who hawked the stuff from their wagons.

So what's itching in your grey matter these days?