I’m Tchelyzt, a nom de plume which refers to the instrument I’ve been learning to play (badly but with great enthusiasm) in middle age. It was a 45th birthday present from my wife who saw it as an alternative to the coveted Harley Davidson which would almost certainly have killed me 
I’m smart, motivated by just about any ‘intellectual’ pursuit and bored by a well paid but essentially sterile job helping big corporations make money. I’m very good at what I do but absolutely dismissive of its value or interest. I kind of fell into it and got lucky. I’ll retire as soon as I can justify it to my family.
INTERESTS
I like literature and discovered recently that many of my favourite authors would be termed post-modernists. Checkout LibraryThing for a sample of what I like. I learned to speak French reasonably well in my thirties and now share my reading fairly evenly between two languages.
I like world cinema, usually fringe more than mainstream and I’m unimpressed by the blockbusters typical of Hollywood. I get to the theatre a handful of times each year.
I like about any kind of music, except country and western, but especially prog rock, the music of my youth.
I love science and though not formally educated in the field, I have read extensively about astronomy, physics, evolution, chaos, emergence. mathematics and artificial intelligence. I’ve been using computers both personally and in my work (though not as an IT professional) since the eighties and currently work on an Apple Macbook Pro laptop. I have programmed in more languages than I have fingers and I see the computer as a laboratory where I can test, by simulation, much of the science I read.
MOTIVATION
Nevertheless I absorb little of what I read or otherwise experience; I enjoy it and move on, saving what little brain space I have for ‘knowledge’, not art or beauty. I greatly admire people (like my wife) who remember ‘unimportant’ stuff like the names of flowers, the last delicious meal they ate, a nice line from a book. On the other hand I’m very happy that I really do like all these things while I’m experiencing them, suggesting to me that I’m not indifferent, but simply not very observant. I rely on understanding rather than memory and so I’m better at knowing ‘how it works’ or ‘what it does’ than ‘what it’s called’. I often wondered if this is a condition I suffer from and does it have a name.
This blog is motivated by the observation that I have enjoyed so much art and forgotten so much. I’ve often felt I should have kept a scrapbook of what I liked and what I detested. Of course, by the time I noticed this, it seemed too late to start. Recently, the philosophical reflection that I’m entering life-3:enjoytm (which follows life-1:learntm and life-2:buildtm) has made me realise that this was just prevarication. There’s plenty of time to read/watch/hear them all again … at least the good ones!
Now I only have to remember which ones not to waste my time on!!
Tchelyzt,
I’ve enjoyed reading your blog. It’s very well done and entertaining. I especially enjoyed the “Yours Truly” section where you discuss your difficulty absorbing what it’s called and your focus on understanding why. The fact that you just read to enjoy. It was good for me to hear someone say this, far too often I have read a book I was supposed to be enjoying as if I was engaged in research. It’s less like entertainment and more like fact finding.
So, thank you for that, and also for the energy you have put into the blog.
S.