Everyone has their own way of killing time on the Internet. Mine is related to that ‘satiable curiosity. It’s absurd. I don’t do games or timewasters and while I’ve done my share of watching laughing babies on YouTube, I don’t find multimedia such a temptation.
What gets me is just..well..have a look. A typical blog-post-writing session. Post is below.
First, there’s all the searches for hyperlinks on the Birmingham Museum of Art website and beyond, looking for information about the artists, suspecting there might be a Catholic sensibility in Viola’s work and wondering what his sense of spirituality might be, and researching that and finding various articles and reviews on that score and so o9n.
That’s just part of the job.
But then there’s this train:
Trying to figure out these Allen sisters.
Which leads to a link to this book on GoogleBooks: The Bryn Mawr College Calendar/Courses 1914 because one of the links led to a mention of a Bryn Mawr student “prepared” and the Margaret Allen School (the book contains not just courses, but students and their courses of study).
Which leads me to peruse the book and marvel at the range and depth of study (I shouldn’t have been surprised. Apologies to any Seven Sisters alumn out there) and ponder about what these women did with their education, which then led me to search for several of the graduate students with distinctive names.
Which led me to read about the lives of a few interesting women, including Mary Gertrude Haseman, who was an expert in Knot Theory
Which led me to read up a bit on Knot Theory because I had no idea such a thing existed and I still don’t understand it, but I can see why someone might want to study it
All of which made me wonder if anyone had ever done a study of, say, one class of these early 20th century women’s colleges to see where they all ended up, and I thought surely with the explosion of women’s studies over the past half-century, someone has, which also led me to think about the Hamilton women (see below) and muse about modern feminism, my own daughter and wondering which kinds of pressures on women were really worse and more fundamentally limiting, and trying not get unrealistic about the past, but still..
All the while occasionally looking up stuff about this new Yellowstone business I’m just hearing about.  And recipes for red lentils and French lentils. And poor Jett Travolta and Israel and Hamas and there’s another two hours gone and as I’ve said before…I know more than when I started, but am I any wiser?
Give me a second. I’ll look it up.