Hobbies

The ability to explore outside the academic world (aka my natural habitat) is one of the reasons why I chose to leave my job in the industry and return to the university. I was watching Slavoj Žižek's movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology and was touched by the message when he said "The first step to freedom is not just to change reality to fit your dreams. It's to change the way you dream" with a background of the dumpsters from the movie They Live. I asked myself this cliche question of what my dream is. And the answer, for the time being, is to explore the world as much as I can. 

I'm a naturally curious person and, admittedly, often spend too much time exploring "useless" things. As a kid, I used to read anything with words on it-be it my dad's policemen training manuals about traffic signs and accompanied exemplary accidents, be it a folk storybook without a cover that my grandfather borrowed from a neighbor in the village, be it users instructions or ingredient lists on the back of a package-I read it all. The world is full of information, useful or not; it is fun for me to notice and explore it. 

I really like what Brian Eno said in his autobiography movie - it is very hard to do something correctly, but we can hope to fail interestingly. Whatever choice we make in life can be proven to be a bad choice retrospectively, but at least we can try to make interesting ones.