Tuesday, September 28, 2010

On Committing to Projects

Lately I've been complaining to at last two (2) people that I have a hard time turning down offers to be involved in things and commit to things, because I am afraid that I an amazing opportunity will pass me by and I'll be pissed at myself for not getting involved, and then I get nvolved and am upset that I am not able to devote the time and energy to it that it deserves, and then I'm upset with myself for getting involved. 


One of my friends (Anne) suggested that what I need to do is truly evauluate how the involvement makes me feel, like on a an emotionally physical level. Am I excited to do this task when I get right down to it? Does it physically make me feel good? Am I (god forbid) ENJOYING IT? This seems like such good sense that I should write a book about it. No! Not a book about it! Just you, know, take it to heart.


Another friend of mine, Laurel, agreed that she does the same thing too. She said "I over-commit all the time. I think it's because I get easily excited by new ideas and I'm bad at estimating how much time each will take and how much time I have to devote to these things. I think if I were more honest about my capabilities vs. eagerness, I would be able to dole out time more effectively."


Why does it take other people to point these things out to me?

Well, It's About Time I Started a Real Blog, Like a Real One

For a long time I've been meaning to start a blog, but I just never got around to it. Well, strictly speaking that's not totally true; I started one on Planet Cancer when I was sick, but then when I didn't have cancer any more it just kind of fell out of my life. Later things kept happening that reminded me how fun it would be to broadcast to the world at occasional small intervals instead of waiting until I had a huge zine ready every so often -- that if I did the cyberspace equivalent of standing out on the street corner with a megaphone, that once I provided myself a space to broadcast those things out loud, even if nobody was listening, I would still have a place I could go to and look at and think, "Yes, that was a nice thread I started there" that I could then decide then if it was something I could flesh out further for my zine articles in Caboose. How is that any different than keeping a journal? Well for one I would actually have the stuff typed out, for one. And for another, I often write in response to little scraps of things that I could just scan in right away and post 'em up and then not save everything to go into some big folder of stuff that I get to, like, every 6 months. I'm wondering f maybe I should be setting up this blog on Wordpress instead of Blogger, because at least Wordpress has that function called Press This that if you're elsewhere on the internet, if you find something you like that you want to blog about, you can do it directly wherever you are instead of having to go back to your blog and starting a new entry there. Well, we'll see.