I had an interesting thought the other day that kind of blew my mind. Does anything physical really exist? Our minds gather information. Everything we see, we touch, taste, smell, is really just our mind telling us that it exists, but what is real then? The question itself if mind boggeling. Some would say that what we touch is physical, it is obviously physical which is why we can feel it. But isn’t it our brain that tells us we “feel” something. Do we actually feel it? If our mind told us something was soft when it was actually hard, our concept of what is hard would be associated with the word soft. Does anything actually exist outside our own consciousness? The same is true for those who are color blind. They may see some colors but their “blue” for instance is something compleatly different than someone else’s blue and yet they’ve always defined blue as the color in which they see. This brings about another question. How did we ever discover that their blue was different from someone else’s? Aren’t words just abstract expressions of the physical world…if there is a physical world at all…

Mind = blown

Useless tid-bits

I work at the library and I create these flyers to go in the bathroom called Literary Loos. Awesome thing to work on right, but nonetheless I find myself really enjoying creating them. In each monthly issue, there is a “did you know” column and over the years I’ve accumulated massive amounts of useless knowledge, so this week I thought I’d share three fun facts.

Do you know why the “x” is associated with a kiss? This dates way back to a time when most people were illiterate. To make documents official (such as a wedding license) people were asked to sign on the line next to the x. Because many couldn’t write there own name, to make the agreement binding they were instead asked to kiss the x. This is how the x became associated with a kiss. This is also where the phrase “sealed with a kiss” come from.

Number two, do you know why we feel so unified with someone we love? There is a deactivation in the parieto-temporo-occipital region of the brain, the part that shows a person their place in space. This place in space also separates us from others within our mind, making us individuals. But when were in love a deactivation of this part of the brain occurs and for a moment in time we feel as if we are unified with our love.

Finally, did you know that the phrase “to fly off the handle” (meaning to get really angry all of a sudden) comes from a time before they had machines to make products. Sometimes axes were not always mounted to their handles properly, thus when someone would swing the axe, it could fly off creating a dangerous situation with unpredictable results. The same is true when someone suddenly gets mad and this is where the phrase comes from.

Random tid-bits of information to feed your noggin! Hope you enjoyed!

Quote of the Week

These days, I keep a journal. Actually, it’s not quite a journal at all, its more of a memory book, but then again it’s not really that either. Sometimes the things you can’t quite explain, have the most significance to you. There’s just too much in them to be equated to an average word. All I can say is I keep everything in this journal. I keep sketches, letters, songs, lost thoughts, ideas, broken concepts. I keep myself in it. Sometimes, I like to just go through some of the older things, things I wrote awhile back. It was in doing this the other night that I came across a quote I had written down that just really re-registered in my mind. It goes something like this…

“Don’t be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life. You don’t have to live forever you just have to live.”

That was line from the novel Tuck Everlasting and it just really stuck with me. If you know anything about the story, you’d know that the Tuck family was blessed/cursed with eternal life and Winnie Foster was offered this life, but she turned it down. I find it interesting that we as people cling to time. We long for it more and more and yet, the moment at hand when we actually have it, we many times squander it. We as a race are so dependent on it, that our days are attached to it. It is on each of our phones, it’s on our watches, it dictates our lives and rules our existance. If only we had more time for this. If only we had less time for that. Now I know we can’t just throw time out the window, but what if, for once, we didn’t worry about how long we have to do something or how long don’t have. What if we stopped and just lived because in the end, worrying about time is just wasting time, isn’t it?

Food for thought…                              

Introductions

My name is Brittany Davis and I’m currently a Visual Communications Major/Graphic Design minor at Mary Hardin Baylor. A little about me. I love the arts, painting, drawling, sculpting, the whole nine yards. I find every piece of creating invigorating and as such, I believe that a lot can go into adding to a creative mind. God created this world to be beautiful. If you’ve ever seen a sunset across the ocean or the misty mountain snow caps in the winter; if you’ve looked into the expanse of the sparkling sky at night, you know this to be true. God is an artist. It only makes since then that we, as his creation, at our very core desire to seek beauty in the world in which we live. If this is true, then creating art is, at its essence, a part of who we are. I know at least it is for me. Therefore, I only found it fitting that in this blog, I would talk about anything and everything I find to be inspiring. Because only though inspiration comes creation!