My friend recently mentioned in one of her emails that she has yet to find her passion. I'm the same. I like lots of stuff, but there is nothing in this world that I love so much that I have been driven to pursue it like my life depended on it. As a result, I am a dabbler - Jill of all trades, mistress of none.
Curiosity is my most pronounced character trait. I saw a woman walking a pig in Long Bridge Park. I marched up to her and started interviewing like I was writing an article for the Burlington County Times. Did she like having a pig for a pet? Do pigs enjoy walking on a leash? How old was her pig? Could I touch her pig? Another time I heard a rumble and the house shook. Since it happened only once, I knew the trembling wasn't caused by soldiers playing war games at McGuire Air Force Base. The TV news didn't report an earthquake. I googled like crazy for a couple of days until I discovered that there was an enormous sonic boom near Galloway, New Jersey that jiggled the southern half of our state.
If I have something close to a passion, it is that I love to read. Combine a love of reading and a nosy nature and you get a person who is pretty good at researching and figuring things out. I often find that answering one query just leads to more questions. Once I clicked so many blue highlighted words in a Wikipedia article about quinoa that I ended up learning the biological definition of lumen - the inside of a tubular space, like the inside of a vein or an intestine.
I think that Wikipedia is a great place to start if you want to know something. Some people say it contains too much inaccurate information, but I still like Wikipedia.
One night I was watching a TV news magazine and I saw a segment about a gathering of Wikipedia editors. Anybody in the whole, wide world can be a Wikipedia contributor/editor. Anybody = Me. I mulled this idea over for about three years. A few months ago I created an account and a few days ago I made my first contribution. I was watching Season 3, Episode 10 of the TV series "Billions," and I noticed the name Patti D'Arbanville in the credits. I recognized the name from the 1989 TV series, "Wiseguy." I remember way too much about the "Wiseguy" series because, though Chris Noth had not yet become Carrie Bradshaw's Mr. Big, I fantasized at the time that he could be mine. I immediately looked up Patti on Wikipedia, and I noticed that her appearance on two episodes of "Billions" had gone unmentioned among her Wikipedia TV credits. I checked out the official "Billions" series site through Showtime network. I also went to IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) to verify all of Ms. D'Arbanville's "Billions" appearances. Then I added the "Billions" information to the the Wikipedia article.
Once I actually edited an article, I began to wonder about my fellow editors. Who are they? Well, they are mostly men. In 2011, only 9% of global editors were women and 15% of editors in the United States were female. Wikipedia hoped to increase its number of female contributors to 25% by 2015, but that didn't happen. Less than 5% of women have 500 or more edits to their names.
Dream big. Five hundred edits. Four hundred ninety nine to go.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/01/28/south-jersey-sonic-boom/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashrut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_(anatomy)
https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-do-so-few-women-edit-wikipedia
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-feminist-edit-a-thon-seeks-to-reshape-wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patti_D%27Arbanville
Here's another little tidbit about Patty D'Arbanville. She was in a relationship with Don Johnson in the early 80's and they have a son together. That was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw her name in the credits of Billions. You have an insatiable curiosity, and I seem to be a collector of obscure information.
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