Monday, November 02, 2009
On What "More Awesome" Means
The stated goal of this blog is to assist me in making my life more awesome. "More awesome," however, is a rather subjective qualifier. Parachuting from a zeppelin onto a 50-foot-tall Christopher Walken while wearing an outrageously flattering cocktail dress and armed only with spike heels and a katana would certainly be more awesome than my life is now, but that's not the sort of result I demand from daily blogging. (Although I'll take it if I can get it.) I thought it might be useful to define exactly the sort of changes I need to make in my life.
My first issue is one of confidence. When I put my mind to it, I have a knack for finding a way to do whatever I damn well please, ignoring most obstacles and all naysayers. Trouble is, I've been afraid to put my mind to it of late. I've had some setbacks that took me down a peg or two too far, and now I need to reclaim the self-assured fearlessness that led me onstage and to France and to narrowly escape trespassing charges and so on.
Here's what I want to do with all that confidence: I want to write nonfiction and short fiction. I want to be published. I want to go to graduate school to research medieval French and English, and I want to earn my doctorate in Linguistics. I want to travel all over the world. I want to teach at a college somewhere I actually want to live. I want to sing in a good choir, and I also want to start a band or a jazz combo to do some gigs for fun. I eventually want to get married and raise children. I want to be closer to the people I love and build better relationships with my friends. I want to get good at aikido and keep up swing dancing. And I want to do it all without compromising my principles or abandoning the weirdness and adventurousness that are my favorite things about me.
I expect this exercise to assist me in several ways. First off, it will help me prove to myself that I can follow through on projects. I have a fairly short attention span and a bad habit of becoming passionately interested in things that I later drop for my next passionate interest. It's time I made that passion productive. Second, it's an opportunity to write for an audience, even an audience of illusory internet people. I want to keep the personal content secondary to essays and commentary and eventually to create something that someone who didn't know me would still want to read. Third, it's a way to create accountability, both to myself and to all you illusory internet people.
In that vein, I have a challenge for you. I'm sure all of you have some aspect of your life with which you are not satisfied, just like I want (among scads of other things) to write more. Share that in the comments (it's okay, it's not like the internet is real life or anything.) This month, let's all get off our asses and do something about it finally. That, my illusory internet friends, would be more awesome.
Labels: challenge