Monday, February 25, 2013

to moodle

I love to moodle.  I knew it as an activity long before I knew it by the name Brenda Ueland gave it in the 1930s.  It means "long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering."  It is an activity used by artists, writers, and other creative people to give the conscious mind time to shut up so the unconscious mind can send up, for purposeful use, all the marvelous ideas it has been weaving together out of what has been seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched.  Sometimes it takes years for the mind to moodle on a given subject.  From amid the poetry I wrote in my twenties a single line stuck with me. Twenty years later I discovered it was actually a painting.  Without moodling I would never have found that out.  But now another thing has floated to the surface of my mind.  Moodle.  It wafts across the internet as I look for things.  It is not the verb to moodle, not the act of moodling, but, oh the glories of the poetry of our modern tongue:  Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.  Barblefark.  It's an online education tool. Doubtless a decent one, but modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment?  Could you have made that more anal or static if you'd tried?  The most interesting thing about that is that you can pluck the first letters and form moodling, an activity of beauty and power.  Not to mention you can often get the laundry folded while doing it.

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