Tangents

Often, when reading internet posts on huffpost, or political blogs, or newspapers, I find a story that raises questions so I try to find answers, or I will see an article in a travel section and realize I don't know much about the destination or the region in which it's located, so I chase some info down. I go on tangents, some short, some an hour-long sojourn. Today, my tangent was Mauritania.

It seems wrong to me to not know something if you can know it. With cancer, for example, I do far less research than you would suspect. Frankly, my science background is very light, rendering most articles fully unintelligible, some articles are simply from one's personal experience which don't offer objectivity (useful perspectives though), and others are miles out newspaper features that offer the skeleton but not the meat and bones of the conclusions from research, of the trials of a new drug, the results of a study of nutrition and cancer, and tangents for me need to yield useful (subjectively!) information about the question that has popped up or the topic upon which I found I knew too little.

Mauritania is the 29th largest country in the world. Or the 30th.  I've seen both used.

Anyone needs to know more, and there's always more to know. Now if I meet a Mauritanian, I will know to ask about the regularity of military coups, the socio-cultural divide between the south and the north, the oases often found at the valley level of the limestone escarpments. I would ask what Nouakchott is like, whether (if I traveled), I'd enjoy what I found there, did you. Know that Mauritania and I are the same age?

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I meandered around the web wondering if I needed to seek out community, survivor networks, places to get a back rub with no deep tissue massage because I was afraid what was left of me would snap in two. I found all of that, but no desire for any of it. I've never been the best resident of a community, even amongst those who share a close experiential affinity. I like being alone too much, I like living in my head, I like being in charge of an army of one.

The success of any good tangent search is the ability to locate a useful piece of information from a site and move on--often a pointer to a new search of a related topic you didn't know of, or hadn't thought of on your own. Too, you have to read and not just scan if the topic is new. And if it's at present getting a bit boring, well, that's what bookmarks are all about.

I have likely satisfied my mission concerning Mauritania-the odds I'll meet someone from there are quite low; there are only a bit over 3.5 million of them according to the 2013 census figures on Wikipedia, or 3.89 million according to the World Bank. But even though this mission, this tangent, was brief, I still find I'm pulling for Mauritania to thrive. Because that's what 95% of my tangents are about: to find the fact, the tip, the procedure, to bring life back to full, to achieve a fair and equitable life, to never stop learning, to thrive.