4: November 2003 Archives

The way it works, if you really want to know, is this: I am a person of big plans and bigger inertia. I am excellent at dreaming up ambitious ideas, and often, I know exactly how they should be completed, but I'm not so good at following through with them. I tend to get overwhelmed and procrastinate, because there is always something I'd rather be doing. Always.

Those who I've worked for, or who have worked with me, are probably aware that there are two ways of dealing with me. 1) Provide deadlines (even ambitious deadlines) and a great deal of structure. I thrive with structure, for some reason, though I don't always like it. It keeps me focused to know exactly what I need to be doing and when, and I am easily distracted. 2) Leave me to my own devices. Be forewarned that you'll get mixed results with this technique.

While this does (ahem, occasionally) apply to my work environment, the fact that I'm accountable to somebody keeps me more focused than I might otherwise be. My own personal projects? That's quite another story. Let's take stock, shall we?

I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year, but as of today, the 4th of November, I have written precisely 0 words. The prospect of 50,000 words by the end of November was just too daunting. I couldn't do it. That's alright, I have other (more important) things I want to do this month, anyway.

Like redesigning this site. I love Movable Type, but I hate that my page is basically the MT template, with just a few slight alterations. I want to declutter and organize, and basically feng shui the hell out of the place. I want to make this site more personal, in both style and content. If there's anything I learned at JournalCon, it's that I want this to be a site that people (other than my dad and my friends) can become engaged in. At the same time, I want to aggregate my web presences together somehow. Oh, and I'd like to use the TypePad subscription I've been paying for since August. And while we're at it, I'd like it to be both seamless to the user (that would be you) and aesthetically pleasing to the creator (that would be me). I don't ask for much, do I?

I'm not completely sure what's prompting this desire to upend everything, to purge things from my life and try to rebuild them based on what I know now but didn't know then. Some things have been changing around me, while others have remained the same. I got promoted, for one. The responsibility promotion, as my dad called it in an e-mail this morning, happened a few months ago, right in the middle of preparations for JournalCon, which gave me effectively about three lives there for a while to try to live in 24-hour days. It's nice, in any case, to have the monetary (and titular) promotion to go along with the responsibility.

The whole thing makes me feel like a grown-up all of a sudden, and so much grown-up-edness, not to mention my birthday in about three weeks, is more than I know how to handle sometimes.

I had an epiphany about a month ago while I was lathering my hair in the shower on a lazy Sunday morning. Somehow, I got started thinking about travel, and how I'd like to do that more often, and about all the things tying me down to Austin and the place I live. This part, in and of itself, wasn't particularly revolutionary. I've had these thoughts before. In fact, two weeks prior to my epiphany, I saw my dad in Kerrville, and he not only asked me when we were going to South America together, but he provided some practical ideas of how I might support myself if I were to go traveling for a more extended period of time.

The ideas themselves weren't new, though it was helpful that they'd been slow-cooking in the little pressure cooker of my brain for a couple of weeks at that point. The revolutionary part was that I set myself a little mental deadline for making a radical change in my life, to rid myself of the things that bind me to one place, and to travel until I'm tired of traveling. The date? My thirtieth birthday. It'll happen in 2006, for those keeping score.

I've been slowly trotting out my little plan to select audiences to test their audiences, like some test-market viewing of a limited-release film, and the reactions have been mixed. I've heard several people say, "Wow, cool! Can I come along?" and "I can totally see you doing that," but then, I've heard some people say, "You don't know what it's going to be like," as well. And it's true, I don't. I don't know if I have the temperament for a nomadic lifestyle, but I'm not sure whether I could know without trying.

I've been a bit nervous about publishing this little missive of mine out here where the whole world can see. It makes it all feel a tiny bit more concrete to show it to an audience that can make me feel accountable. Because it is absolutely a cop-out for me to plan a date three years in advance. Any number of things could happen between now and then that could cause me to change my mind, and I'm fine with that possibility. What's remarkable about this idea is that it changes substantially my own concept of who I am and who I might become, and that's more exciting than anything else I've done lately.