Blog 1: Intro to "Ideando"

I was 8 years old when I figured out Kitty would perk up his ears, widen his feline eyes, and turn his head abruptly to the right and then to the left, when my shriek reached the register that made my throat hurt.  When I showed my mother what I could make Kitty do, she shook her head and told me I just spent my time "ideando."  When I shared with her that my name backwards when read phonetically (in Spanish) meant I fooled you (in Spanish), again she told me that I was just "ideando."

I never thought much about the word or its meaning which I soon pieced together based on her tone, body language, and when she used it to describe me. I never really thought much about the word perhaps until I realized "yugitas" (pronounced "you--ghi--tas" -- use English pronunciation) was not really what you called yogurts.  Or, perhaps, it was when I realized Charles Bronson was not the dog in the Charlie Brown cartoon but the somewhat racially ambiguous tough guy that appeared in a lot of movies, and Charlie Brown was not Snoopy but the boy who owned Snoopy.  I am not sure when exactly it happened.  But, definitely by the time I was 10 or 11, I decided "ideando" would continue to be part of the lexicon of my inner dialogue, but I would never give it voice.  I never had the heart to question my mother as to whether or not "ideando" was a real word or not.  I did try to correct the Charles Bronson and Charlie Brown confusion, which was as successful as trying to explain to her that "to" is where you write the name of the person receiving the gift and "from" is the person giving the gift.  Every year I still receive a gift to my mother from Elizabeht, and no I did not make a typo when writing my name.  That's really how she writes it, even though according to my birth certificate my name has the more traditional spelling.  For years I wondered why she always misspelled my name, and it wasn't till I was in my late 20's that rather inadvertently I figured it out.

But, I digress.  I liked the idea of "ideando," so I decided I would not even bother finding out if it was a real word, and for about 27 years I never gave its correctness another thought.  It was not until 2008, twenty-seven years after figuring out what I could do to freak out Kitty, that I seriously reconsidered the word.  

IBM aired a commercial in which a man walks into a dark room, turns on the light, and finds rows of people laying down on the floor.  He asks them, "What are you all doing?" and they respond they are "ideating."  To which he replies, "I...D...what?"  Ideating they respond and go on to explain ideating goes beyond just thinking, it is a structure, a process, a way of rethinking things and innovating.

I can only hope this blog will be about ideating or that my mother was right and I do spend a lot of time "ideando."