© Kameelah Janan Rasheed. All rights reserved.
Written in my Grade 3 end-of-year reflection book (1994). When asked what my favorite things were that year, this was one of the activities I chose.An intense and immersive focus on a specific interest or activity characterizes hyperfixation. It is a common trait in ADHD, OCD, and Autism. While it is sometimes referred to as a “special interest,” hyperfixation is considered all-consuming. While often cast as a disorder or disruption, I choose to think about my hyperfixations as a spiritual gift of deep curiosity that animates all parts of my life. These episodes of deep curiosity are often cyclical; maybe orbital is a better word.
They are orbital in that I am circling or being gravitationally pulled toward something, and I keep circling until I get close enough to what I think I am chasing... something like a ring gazing orbit. I never get there - the point of sustained contact, but I ride the edge, and I think this is where the thrill is. It is never about the object of fixation, but about seeing how far I can push my perceptive capacities to see from multiple points of reference simultaneously.
Yet another shout-out to Yone for inspiring me to make more lists!
Current Curiosities
- Transhumanism, Post-Earth Repositories, Luxury Survival Bunkers
- Black Holes
- Stellar Ingestion
- Storyboard Weaver Software
- Non-Newtonian Fluids
- Multiphase Materials
- Photosynthesis (specifically, photosystem II)
- Death bots
- Lisa Frank Stationery
- Doomsday Millenarian Movements and Eschatology
- Eruvs (and other temporary religious architecture/spatial intervention)
- Xerox Machines and Spirit Duplicators
- UAPs
- California’s Eugenics Program
- Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Artist Bios + Artist Statements
- Walid Raad
- olivia mckayla ross
- Senga Nengudi
- manuel arturo abreu
- Herdimas Anggara
- Gabrielle Octavia Rucker
- Chang Yuchen
Childhood Software
Wikipedia Lists
- Methods of Divination
- List of humorous units of measurement
- List of non-coherent units of measurement
- List of mathematical knots and links
- List of feeding behaviours
- List of organisms named after works of fiction
- List of possible dwarf planets
- List of mountains on the Moon
- List of landings on extraterrestrial bodies
- List of letters used in mathematics, science, and engineering
- List of eponymous laws
- List of names for the biblical nameless
- List of hottest stars (not people, actual stars)
- List of surfaces
- List of hypothetical Solar System objects
- List of exceptional asteroids
- List of inventors killed by their own invention
- History of the world's tallest structures
- List of fictional ships
- List of home computers
- List of programming languages by type
- List of shibboleths
- List of media spin-offs
“Weird” Museums and Collections I’ve Visited
- The L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition (Los Angeles, CA)
- The Mütter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA)
- The Mystic Museum (Burbank, CA)
- Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA)
- Morbid Anatomy Museum (Brooklyn, NY)
“Weird” Museums and Collections I’d Like to Visit
- The X-Files Preservation Collection (Saratoga County, NY)
- The Meguro Parasitological Museum (Tokyo, Japan)
- Musée du Parfum (Paris, France)
- The Institute of Illegal Images - LSD Blotter Museum (San Francisco, CA)
- Rosewell UFO Museum (Rosewell, NM)
- Vent Haven Museum: The World's Only Museum Dedicated to Ventriloquism (Fort Mitchell, KY)
- Rice University: Archives of the Impossible (Houston, TX)
- The International Cryptozoology Museum (Portland, ME)
- University of New Hampshire: Betty and Barney Hill Collection (Durham, New Hampshire)
- The National Museum of Funeral History (Houston, TX)
- The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles, CA)
- The Icelandic Phallological Museum (Reykjavík, Iceland)
- Otaru Music Box Museum (Hokkaido, Japan)
- German Food Additives Museum (Hamburg, Germany)