dilettante

21st century Renaissance

So, what's the deal with this dilettante stuff anyway? It's surely meant to be a slur, isn't it? Our job on this planet is to be as serious and devoted and committed as we can possibly be, and that means you can't throw your concentration around like a crazy person. Isn't there some kind of drug to cure people who can't settle down?

I mean really, man, the Renaissance is so fifteenth-century. Don't they call that sort of behavior ADHD these days?

I can't help it. I'm not truly good at anything, and whether it's because (as my mother might say) I haven't applied myself, or because I just don't have the skills, I've come to terms with the Renaissance mindset. I want to have my fingers in a dozen different dishes at once. I need to appease my frayed attention span, so I dabble.

Writing, reading, library science, bookbinding, knitting, photography, drawing, trying to do this HTML business, planting things, making things, cooking things....I've been an art student, a photo technician, a picture framer, and now a grad student in Library Science (at San Jose State University, the tight pants campus). And along the way I've checked out a whole lot of seemingly unrelated library books, because my interests keep changing.

You can call me flaky if you want to, an amateur. It's all right. I prefer bohemian, though, or eclectic. But the best of all words is dilettante. I mean, you can't go wrong with a word based in the Italian dilettare--"to delight."