While I am endlessly trying to figure out the intricacies of my real life, I have also recently opened up to the idea of creating my new self/new life in Second Life. The truth is that my exploration of Second Life derived from the boredom I was experiencing when I took a course in Technology and Education.
Here is my video of the SL project: Patricia's Learning Landscape
My article on SL can be found here: Learning Environments: Second Life
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
The Summer Has Been Good to Me...
I....
Learned the difference between MMORPG and virtual environments (Second Life), wrote an article on Second Life for Wikibooks, built my own amazing space on JoKayDia Island (the video should be here some time soon - hopefully).
Had an AMAZING teacher, Sandra Schecter (and those come only in long intervals).
Remembered how much I love fast driving... :)
Attended AILA (Multilingualism: Challenges and Opportunities) in Essen, Germany, and ReCALL in Antwerp, Belgium, organized by Linguapolis (both were amazingly fantastic).
Walked through the streets of Barcelona at midnight looking for Sagrada Familia (and that's a ritual already).
Got inspired by my student's blog. HER space. HER thoughts:
"Life is not about finding yourself, but about creating yourself."
Still working on all of the above points...