Today's little things.

I watched Sam Mendes' Away We Go today, and found it to be a funny, smart, feel-good film. Currently... acquiring a copy of 500 Days of Summer. Yeah, I didn't think I'd find myself watching rom-com-dramas, either. Go figure.

Also began teaching myself HTML, CSS, and Javascript today. I'm already fairly comfortable with HTML and CSS, having tinkered with blog layouts and the like in the past. Javascript and dynamic pages is something new to me, though, so I'm gonna have to work on that. Eventually I hope to also learn PHP and SQL, for the complete web development package.

Always too much time.

Rock still in stream, no - pebble bobbing along. While sky colors above. While slowly riverbanks crumble or grow. Still, flowing. Maybe mote of dust in cloud, in raindrop, in snowflake. Maybe glacial boulder. Maybe concrete block upon concrete block. Still, poised to fall back into earth. No escape for pieces of earth, always too much time for weariness.

An overdue progress report.

So, not much to report, truth be told.

The Azeus application process finished for me last Thursday, and now I only have to wait for the result. Within two weeks, they say.

The exercise train is chugging along again. I should move my exercise time to the mornings, though, to minimize the chances of laziness and other preoccupations getting in the way.

Lately I've been on a fiction binge. Escapism, tsk. Getting back into science fiction and fantasy, it seems like ages since I've seriously touched the stuff.

Throwing my whimpering productive self - another figment of the imagination - a bone, I've also been reading Stein on Writing, and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Heh.

Oh, and I've begun my nth attempt at Gravity's Rainbow. I know, I know. Good luck.

After several hours of being awake

Things seem still. Melancholy, exacerbated by Murakami overdose.

But what is there to do. Games have lost their attraction. I don't think reading books or listening to music would, and thankfully they haven't. Yet. Forget about doing something productive. Much more of this and I don't know what could happen.

I should get out of the house, take a walk. Make myself feel closer to the world.

Transcribing someone else's stream of consciousness

I signed up for this Skype transcription gig some time back. Never really got into it - the time and effort, especially for fast speakers or bad quality audio, hardly seemed the low rate. Still, the potential was there for the audio to be interesting, and then I could think of the pay as just a bonus for having spent some time listening to an interesting conversation.

Recently I found myself checking the available files for transcription, and found that there were a whole lot of files from this guy in New York who walks around and uses Skype as a sort of audio journal. Pretty interesting, listening in to someone else's stream of consciousness. Let's see how many files I can transcribe before the novelty wears off.

Escapism, or Unfortunately, I am not a figment of the imagination

You know what I want to do? Save up some money, make up a plausible excuse to be gone a couple of days. Then disappear alone. I don't know where I'd go, and it doesn't really matter too much. It just has to be somewhere I've never been before. And somewhere I wouldn't accidentally meet someone I knew. Somewhere to be alone.

This might just be more escapism, but I really feel that such an experience would help me get a better grip on myself. Yeah right, wishful thinking.

These past two weeks, I feel like I've let myself get into a real rut. Each day brought the same vague worrying about my lack of progress, and continued inaction. Each day I would refuse to face these feelings, choosing instead to immerse myself in Murakami's fiction, music, and the interactions of strangers and friends on the Internet.

All the while, of course, rationalizing to myself that this state of affairs would only be temporary. That there was really nothing I could do, that I deserved a break. That I needed to relax and just let the image of what I want to do form by itself. To an extent these are all true, as all rationalizations are.

But only to an extent; no matter how peaceful, a rut is a rut. Things like this can't go on forever. I need to feel that I myself am creating something, bringing something of worth into this world. Being someone of worth.

The difference between me and a protagonist in a Murakami novel? No supernatural forces are going to shake me out of my self-imposed stupor. No beautiful, mysterious, troubled woman is going to appear and turn my world around.

I'm going to have to change my reality by myself.

On navel-gazing, lack of motivation, fear of failure, and personal development.

Shortly after I started blogging/journalling more than five years ago, I've held onto the assumption that if only I could understand my self enough to write about my situation accurately and comprehensively, it'd make dealing with it, if not exactly easy, at least seem possible. A worthy enough goal.

And so, many times when I would feel sad and frustrated and clueless, I'd dutifully attempt to chronicle my thoughts on whatever issues happened to be bothering me presently. I have to say, this resulted in some of my most cringe-worthy journal entries. Reading the earnest spoutings of a naive earlier self is embarrassing, to say the least.

However, while understanding is part of the battle, it's not really the part that I have the most trouble with. I'm too good at rationalizing. It's too easy for me to get caught up in concocting explanations for all the different aspects of the situation, without getting any closer to a resolution. In pessimistic moods, I can overthink and dwell on the perceived consequences of failure even before taking any action.

I suppose writing this now is mostly just more of the same, but somehow I have to believe that I know better know, hah! (Obvious spoiler: No, I don't.)

Ever since I've been self-aware enough to doubt and second-guess, I've been frustrated with my lack of motivation. Sure, I can understand, or at least drum up reason upon reason, why I should be doing something, but the punch, the visceral feeling of desire has rarely been there. All the reasons for all the different things convince me of nothing but my own confusion. No changes occur. I continue to drift, holding down a vague dissatisfaction.

“But knowing what I don’t want to do doesn’t help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don’t have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That’s my problem now. I can’t find the image.” - Toru Okada, protagonist of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Sometimes it scares me to think that this is true for me as well. That I could do just about anything if somebody made me. What would that make me, who would I be then? Other times, it just gives me a feeling of peace, thinking that whatever happens, I'll be able to deal. Blissful passivity.

Should I be smacking myself in the face?

When there's a will, there's a way. What do you do when you can see many different ways, but really can't conjure the will to follow any of them? It's easy to say, try them on, and see what fits, but again, where is the will? As I see it, I can generate possibilities rationally, but seemingly lack the capability to become emotionally invested in any of them, to effectively and consistently bridge the gap between intention and action.

I've been on a self-help kick lately, and, I've got to say, that stuff isn't quite as bad as it used to seem to me. A lot of it is useless fluff, to be sure, but there are genuine insights to be had. And sure, maybe a lot of it is common sense. But as I continue to explore the personal development literature, I get the feeling that these guys are saying essentially the same things not because these things are trivial, but precisely because they're true. But it's hard to swallow common sense when it's coming from someone else, and it's easy to fool ourselves and say, yeah, yeah, we understand all that - even though we're not really living as if we do. And so they have to repeat themselves until we really really get it.

Someone just told me, hey, you're just afraid of failure because your fragile pride can't handle it. I have to say that I agree. I've never had to deal with real failure before, perhaps because I've so assiduously avoided even the slightest risk of it. Consciously or unconsciously, sometimes I tend to be too focused on failure to the point of paralysis, complacency, mediocrity.

But, yes, there is no success without failure. I won't develop as a person without making mistakes. My challenge is to get up my courage, and learn to deal with failure while focusing my thoughts on success. (Actually, the more immediate challenge is to convince myself. But we already knew that.)