Last year I worked from home one day to do some research about the legal implications of anonymous crime tip hotlines. After being distracted by an article in the University of Hawaii Law Journal entitled "Wiping out the Ban on Surfboards at Point Panic," I started thinking about inspiration - about what it meant to be inspired, and what it meant to be inspirational.
I don't remember exactly what I decided about the nature of inspiration, but whatever it is it led me to decide that I could acquire the quality of being inspirational if I could just be inspired enough. I put recordings of two speeches on repeat on itunes for 8 hours - Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, and JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you" inaugural address. Sometimes, between spurts of research, I would read along with the recording. It was most fun to read along imitating Dr. King's amazing cadences and modulations of volume and speed, although I'm pretty sure I sounded ridiculous, I think my inspired-> inspiring model was proven wrong, but it was an awesome 8 hours.
