All of My Interests
As I write this, it's Mother's Day 2016 . I was just on the phone with my mother, and we talked about a bunch of the things I've been involved in over the years. She said that at some point, she'd like a list of all of my interests. More specifically, all of the things I'd gotten involved with for some period of time, so not just passing "oh that's cool" kind of interest, but stuff I actually put time and effort into learning. [Edit: this has become more of a living document as I've thought of more things beyond the original list]
- Dinosaurs/archaeology/anthropology (lots of different manifestations of one interest)
- Insect collection
- Coin collection
- Stamp collection
- Star Wars
- Special Effects
- Sci-Fi (general)
- Astronomy
- Writing (poetry, short stories, etc.)
- Printing and publishing
- Games and Gaming (mostly RPGs and tabletop games [Go, Majiang], but some video games)
- Geocaching & letterboxing
- History (ancient Europe, medieval Europe, some China)
- Meditation and Taijiquan, a.k.a. T'ai chi
- Irish step dancing
- Life coaching/personal development
- Paper making
- Soap making
- Book binding
- Playing the piano
- Music written prior to 1950 (mostly in Europe and Asia, but currently have polyrhythmic Royal Drums of Ghana in the background)
- Playing the harp
- Calligraphy
- Castle architecture
- Manuscript illumination
- Drawing (charcoal, pen & ink)
- Various methods of secret writing (codes and cyphers, alternate alphabets, shorthand, etc.), spycraft, detectives, and other real and imagined manifestations of figuring out hidden or secret things.
- Latin
- Mandarin
- German
- Welsh
- Toki Pona
- American Sign Language (ASL)
- Afrikaans
- Choir/vocal performance
- Acting
- Public speaking
- Systems thinking (e.g., Fifth Discipline)
- Marketing
- Business systems
- Tea
- Personal finance (Your Money or Your Life, investment clubs)
- Alternative currency systems
- British literature
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Philosophy (Comparative religion, Taoism, philosophy of science, epistemology)
- Logic (I know, it's philosophy too, but I listed it separately because it's “applied philosophy”)
- Cognitive biases and rational thinking skills
- Sociology
- Environmentalism, particularly related to systems or economics
- Genealogy
- Genetics
- Education/teaching/training
- Nonviolent Communication, nonviolence, and related social justice issues
- History of English
- Fantasy literature (Lord of the Rings, etc.)
- Computers/tech (generally falling in the “advanced user” level, not developer/programmer)
- Pens, ink, paper–using them, how they're made, and how they interact with each other
- Screen printing
- Digital strategy and analysis/big data/machine learning
- Science (including debunking commonly-held beliefs with data)
- Gardening (food, not flowers–practical stuff)
- Victorian England
- Voluntary simplicity during the early part of the movement
That's what I came up with off the top of my head, and looking about the house for artifacts of my activities. There are lots of other things that are basically combinations of the above. I considered "health" for example, but realized really that was just the confluence of science, epistemology, systems thinking, gardening, self improvement, tea, and genetics and not something I'm interested in as its own stand-alone topic. Obviously there's lots of overlap in the above list, and in some cases I tried to strike at the common thread of the interest.