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which children’s storybook character are you?

this quiz was made by colleen

I didn’t get much done this weekend by way of results most of you can see. I spent several hours yesterday finalizing my playlist for the Burn, Baby Burn! CDs I will be mailing out today (Today is the deadline to have them put in the mail. Go figure.) I may post the playlist in a few days, once the CDs have had a chance to get where they’re going. I had hoped to get work finished on Modern Evil this weekend, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t do ANYTHING to it since I left work Friday, so … soon, but .. not yet.

I did get a lot done otherwise. I saw four movies, all of which I enjoyed (though some of the people that joined be didn’t think as highly of them). I was particularly busy all day Saturday, and have almost nothing to show for it. I did my laundry. Let’s see.. what else?

Did any of you see the Brak show last night? Hilarious. And Insomniac was in Tempe, so that was good, too. *yawn* I should probably have gone to bed sooner, but between late night TV & folding laundry, I felt compelled to stay up until it was over. I’m going to go work on Modern Evil some more, and hopefully when I finish that, I’ll post more here.

I just thought I’d remind everyone that today is 1.1.10.-1, meaning that exactly 30 days from now it will be 1.1.1.0. The paranoid among you will want to be sure to have rations, clean water, and perhaps some weapons onhand, because from the various descriptions I’ve heard, you may need to be able to fend for yourself after this month. The spiritual among you will want to be sure to make your peace with God before the month is out; from what I hear, the end of the world, the 2nd coming of Christ, or some other general apocalypse is supposed to occur in 30 days. I don’t actually know what/if the rest of you think about the beginning of the zero year of a calendar I have been counting up to for eight or nine of your calendar years, but take heed: I know I have plans for after that particular calendar date.

My family has a traditional holiday food, Baccala, that is only made one or two days a year, usually on Christmas eve/Christmas morning. I often want to have some at other times of the year (such as right now, today), but my mother refuses to make it any other time. So, I decided that I should just break down and make my own. The ingredients for it are available year-round, so the only thing really standing between me and my Baccala is my lack of a deep fryer.

I thought I’d take a gander online to see what was available before I ventured out into the world to see what was on sale in actual brick-and-mortar stores, and … let me show you. I thought I was looking for something small and traditional, like this, and I did eventually find it, and it was the price I expected, but first I found .. well … I found something that … it still doesn’t look like a deep fryer to me, here … and I guess you’re paying for … design. And before I found that normal, cheap one at Amazon, I found this much more expensive one, with … all sorts of interesting features. That one reminds my of my Maytag Neptune washing machine; it tumbles the food over and over in a low volume of fluid & claims that this process is better than the conventional process and uses less raw materials to make crispier, lower-fat foods.

So, I’ll probably either just go down to the local store and buy a $40 cheap fryer, or save up and buy the Maytag Neptune of deep fryers, the Deluxe Cool-Touch Roto Deep Fryer from DeLonghi. Because that’s just how I do things, sometimes.

I’m just so … ignorant. I don’t know much of anything. There is just so much of everything that I just have never learned. I have/had so much potential, but I’ve rarely applied myself, and in recent years have slipped even further. I hardly read books. Time slides over me and I hardly know it came and went. How did I get to be 23 years old so fast? How did I become so far removed from any form of regular education? It baffles me how long it has been since I have taken a complete course of any kind at any school. It doesn’t feel like long ago, but … someone with a lot more motivation could have earned an entire undergraduate degree in the time since I was disqualified from ASU. When I got out of HS at 16, I had a little advantage, but now I’m at a disadvantage. Most of the people my age who are ever going to hold a degree already do, or are working diligently on it. Somewhere along the line I think I just … lost track of where I was supposed to be going in life. Or maybe I just never had it clear in my mind.

I’m doing allright, I suppose. I make enough money to pay my bills and keep up on my existing debt (though I probably can’t afford to take on new debt, and at the rate I’m going will remain in debt for a couple/few years at the least). I feed and clothe myself. I even have extra money to entertain myself; I spend hundreds of dollars a month on music and movies and I’m building a library of DVDs I hardly find the time to watch most of. I’m not in dire straits, by any means. Still, there is something missing.

I … I’ve been working on trying to figure out what I want to do with my time and with my life for as long as people have been asking me (since childhood) to write down my “goals” … and I’m doing better. Still, I am finding that I have some deeply rooted, self-esteem issues that have been playing against me very subtly for a long time. I want to paint and write and make movies and write songs, sure, and I am aware that there are people doing these things and making a living, but … I don’t think I’ve ever even bothered to think that I could be one of them. I have always looked at the things that I like to do as things to do in the spare time between earning a living and sleep. The way I’ve been going, if I ever did end up successfull, I would probably still try to work a regular job (a la Andy Kaufman bussing tables), believeing that the success couldn’t be more than fleeting.

Mixed up in my weird belief that I could never be financially successful doing creative works is my weirder desire to be able to spend my time working on creative works without having to worry about financial interests at all. Like, I don’t want possible future value of my work (or anyone’s work) to change the way the work is created, or even to spur the work into existence. I like the idea of Art for the sake of Art, and I don’t like the idea of subverting a creative skill to enable financial success (that is: I like the idea of writing, but I want to write what I want to write, not what a magazine or book publisher thinks their demographic wants to read just because I need the paycheck.) So I end up having to address even my most ambitious creative endeavours as though they were simply hobbies: I budget for them almost as entertainment expenses, and then I usually don’t even think about trying to turn them into something more.

These things are things I am trying to change. I want to be able to get enough paintings that I consider good to be confident before I even begin to try to find a gallery that will show my work, but at least I’ve begun to think about being shown. I’ve been saying for the last decade that I would write songs/be part of a “band”, but before the last few weeks have never taken any action on it or formed specific plans for making such a thing come about; now I have begun to put together the digital tools I will need to create music despite my inability to play a physical instrument, and have set a date by which I will have at least one song completed. Then in May I’m going to write a novel (I’ll write more on this later, because I’m encouraging all of you to join me in writing a novel in a month, a la NaNoWriMo), and after that work on a screenplay and before the end of the year I’d like to be filming my first short films. My plan from there is to reach a point where I am confident enough in my ability to produce quality films that I actively begin approaching film festivals, and with luck from there, find ways to get actual budgets to make films.

Okay, well, I just accidentally spent a couple hours doing other things (ie:work) and have totally lost my train of thought/emotion. I guess I was feeling down because of all the stuff I don’t know, but reminding myself of all the ways I am doing some of the things I want with my life. Still, when I list off all these great and fulfilling things I’m doing, I tend to leave off the list whatever I wanted to do but am not. Like inventing or researching theoretical physics (I’ve wanted to come up with a unified field theory before they even called it a unified field theory) or finally getting to all that literature I’ve been putting off reading…

At a couple of points in the above text I paused to write on a different train of thought that ties in with what I was writing at that moment. You can read that by hitting the following link:

Continue reading I hate not knowing