Sticky Thoughts

Funny thing about the Internet: it’s often a double-edged sword, at least when it comes to using it to feel “connected” to the world at large. It can bring you closer to people and allow you to feel like part of a community, or it can cut you down and make you feel like you’re the proverbial wallflower, unseen and unheard by the chattering crowd.

Of course, it’s all in how you wield it, whether you take advantage of the opportunities it offers to express yourself or whether you let yourself remain the quiet observer. From blogs and photo sites like Flickr to online forums and social networking sites like Facebook, it’s easy to wander, looking at what other people are doing and saying without actually making your presence known.

It can be fun, true, and interesting, even inspiring, to use the Internet as a window into other people’s lives, but at some point that window feels too much like it’s made of one-way glass. It didn’t use to be that noticeable, back in the day when there was a tad less emphasis on the social aspects of the ‘Net, before people were putting their lives online en masse. Now, though, when it seems everyone has *some* aspect of themself willingly posted for all to see, not following suit can be a rather lonely prospect.

A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a link to the White House’s newly updated Civil Rights page and pointed out the addition of a section on issues important to the LGBT community. I read through it, and I have to say, I’m honestly very impressed. And actually, not a little teary-eyed as well.

Now, I know that these are really just words, and that especially in politics words don’t usually mean a thing until something actually gets done, but still… the sheer existence of this section, on a page called “Civil Rights,” on the website of the White House! The website that, to quote a line from one of the first blog posts under its new leadership, will “serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.” The official electronic mouthpiece, in other words. The one-stop resource for all things related to the new presidential administration, its views, policies, and current plans.

And a resource that’s being used, at least in part, to talk about support for things like repealing the military’’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy… and support for repealing the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” and expanding the rights given to same-sex couples to include all of the more than 1,100 federal benefits as well… and even support for expanding adoption rights, in language that can’t get much plainer or more direct: “[President Obama] thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.”

… Wow. Just… wow. Talk about a turn-around from the previous administration, eh? Again, it may not be “real” in the political sense until the legislation’s drafted and things get changed and repealed and enacted in the proper way – and I’m sure that, even for Obama himself, there are plenty of hoops to jump through – but it’s still amazing, not to mention supremely uplifting, to know – hard as it may be to believe -  that on the actual website of the President of the United States, there is FINALLY direct, unequivocal support for LGBT people and their rights in words that don’t reek of two-faced, patronizing hypocrisy.

Change has come, indeed.

I’m in a rather contemplative mood at the moment. I suppose I’m always kind of in a contemplative mood at some level, given my perhaps overdeveloped self-awareness (and/or self-consciousness), but tonight it’s especially palpable. And for good reason: touched off by a vague feeling of dissatisfaction (whether valid or not) with my life’s accomplishments – personal and professional – thus far, I started thinking more deeply about my past and what’s led me to this point in my present.

Somehow, that wound up with me looking back at old text files on my computer, files with scraps of writing and poetry of mine from as far back as 1996… half-finished book ideas, paragraphs of introduction to stories that never got the attention they deserved, lines of verse of varying quality but with relatively consistent themes… even files that contain nothing but a single sentence – or even just a title – that nevertheless managed to convey (to my own brain, at least) where I wanted to go from there.

I know what you’re thinking (you anonymous reader, you). You’re thinking that my little foray into the depths of my hard drive has me regretting all those ideas that I never went anywhere with, that I’m wistfully wondering why I even then, 12 years ago or more, could seemingly never start something and finish it. And you’d be partially right. Especially in light of my recent posts on the concept of failure – and reflecting Natasha’s spot-on comment about “inertia” – I do feel a bit like a broken record that keeps going over the same groove but never gets anywhere worthwhile.

That’s not really it, though, or not all of it. I enjoyed reading what I wrote back then, after all, and if I start to ask myself why I didn’t continue with some of it, I just tell myself, truthfully, that I wasn’t ready to, that they were great ideas but ones that I – in all honesty – probably didn’t know how to fully give life to at the time, that today I have more of the skills and knowledge and experience to convincingly translate those ideas into “reality.” I can still take those ideas and run with them, so to speak.

The real problem is that in reading through my past writings, seeing those ideas again brought to light and interpreting them through the lens of my mind of today, I wonder not so much why I didn’t do more with them when I first thought of them… I wonder, instead, where I’ve been since then. Where’d the “me” who wrote those book ideas and introductory paragraphs and lines of verse and story titles go? Why haven’t I looked at them before now and – perhaps more importantly – why did so many of them seem so new? Why – for a person who always prided himself on his imagination and his sense of fantasy and wonder – do they all seem so far away, like ancient history?

Have I really let myself become so absorbed in the inanity of the present – the rat race of everyday reality and the focus on all the pointless minutiae of modern society – that I forgot about all those worlds and stories and characters of my childhood and early teenaged imaginings? How did my mind get so clouded by a daily routine that I lost sight of the fantasies within, the ones that – when I was younger – mattered more to me than anything?

When did I lose my way?

As a quick-and-concise follow-up to my previous post on failure, a bit of wisdom from Sir Winston Churchill:

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

What is failure?

The word can mean many things, but it seems to universally, across its myriad uses, have a strongly negative connotation – at least to my mind. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that a failure is just an opportunity for growth, an obstacle to be learned from and then overcome, that it’s not really wholly negative at all. Nonetheless, the silver lining on the proverbial cloud doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a cloud, and doesn’t necessarily keep it from raining on your parade in the first place. (Disclaimer: I’m writing this blog post while not in the best of moods – in case you couldn’t already figure that out from the post’s title or tone – so take any perceived pessimism with a grain of salt, and not as a reflection of my outlook on life generally.)

We can all think of things that we associate with failure, the economy being the big one right now but of course it’s by no means the only prominent example. You could look at a political campaign – whether presidential or one against a certain state proposition – and call it a failure… though in the former case you might be happy it – or rather, he – failed (if you share my particular political inclinations) whereas the failure of the latter could render words like “angry,” “discouraged,” and “resentful” hard-pressed to accurately describe your (or my) emotions. Talk about politics as personal, huh? (At least for the one side, but that’s a topic for another post.) Or about politics as exemplifying how success for one means failure for another. If one person wins, another has to lose? (There’s that pessimism again.)

While the economic and political arenas can usually provide us with plentiful chances to use the word “failure,” they obviously haven’t cornered the market on inadequacy and defeat. Failure is oftentimes a lot closer to home, to the extent that a person could talk about “feeling like a failure.” What does that even mean, though? At what point does one go from “human being” to “failure”?

I could think up all kinds of life situations & all sorts of psychological motivations that could have a person consider themself a failure, but ultimately, though I do (apparently) like to write and ramble, I should come to the point that makes most sense for me at this time, the one that inspired this post. And that is this: I think “failure” isn’t just about attempting something and not succeeding. It’s not just about making mistakes or goofing up, and not about trying but not quite managing to achieve your goals. It’s definitely not about money or votes, and it’s not even about how many people (don’t) find you attractive enough or interesting enough to talk to.

It is instead about change – or more accurately, the lack of change. It’s about not moving forward, not going anywhere. It’s about not succeeding not because you screwed up or didn’t have what it took, but because you didn’t make the attempt to begin with. It’s about not growing, not reaching, and not doing.

Failure, at its worst, happens when nothing happens at all. Even if the alternative means having to get rained on once in a while.

Command line is stuck
And the GUI has frozen;
It’s time to reboot.

Lately it seems I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Unfortunately, what I’ve been reading has not necessarily been what I think I should be reading. What I should be reading – like, really, really should be reading – are all those lovely research articles and books that actually relate directly to my thesis-not-quite-yet-in-progress. (I swear I’ll finish my Master’s on time… really.) No, instead, what I have been reading is news.

Yep, news. And lots of it. Whether it’s the oft-updated drop-down of “Latest BBC Headlines” that comes standard as a Live Bookmark in Firefox or the seemingly exhaustive (and sometimes, exhausting) list of stories I see in my frequent trips to Google News, I have been reading the news like there’s no tomorrow. (Of course, to hear some journalists tell it, there might not be. Global collapse, anyone?)

Okay, so maybe I’m not reading every single story I see. I mean, let’s face it, do I really care that so-and-so is now playing for such-and-such team or that Actor X has broken up with Actress Y and is now dating Model Z? Sorry, just doesn’t matter to me. I can’t help but wonder, though, if in my desire to stay informed about everything else in the world, I might be going a bit overboard. Overdosing on reality. Filling myself up with stories that – in the long run – are not really all that relevant.

Granted, that might be the case for most people and for most of the news they take in. A lot of the stories we read, watch, or hear about are ones we probably didn’t need to know, anyway. And even more importantly, given the state of the world and how “negative” much of the news is, is it even healthy to take it all in if it doesn’t personally affect us?

But how do we know that it won’t affect us unless we know about it? And even if it doesn’t, even if a story’s about something taking place thousands and thousands of miles away on a different continent across an ocean in some farflung part of the world, isn’t it good to know about it, anyway? See how other people live, struggle, and (hopefully) survive? I ask myself these questions, but I’m not always sure of the answers.

In the quest to stay informed about the goings-on on this big little planet of ours, how much information is too much?

How appropriate. I spend days (weeks, months…) thinking off and on about my badly neglected blog, about how to best bring it back to life, about how to craft the “perfect” re-starter post to freshen things up and get things going again… and then as I’m here looking at my own past advice to “just do” and forget about perfection, Seal’s “Bring It On” starts playing on my music player.

Takes a while, but finally one particular line in the song sinks in and reinforces the message of what I’m reading: “Don’t wait until tomorrow.”

I have a New Year’s resolution.

As January rolls forward and 2008 steadily increases its hold on our calendars, I have – like so many others – decided to take the beginning of yet another revolution around the Sun as an opportunity to make a (hopefully) lasting change in my life. This will be the year, I say, fully aware of the cliché; this year will be different, I predict, knowing as I do so that I’m echoing the thoughts of countless other individuals bent on a “fresh start.” This year, we all chirp in unison, this year we will be different.

And yet, here I have to go somewhat out of tune. Though I do want to be “different,” I’m not necessarily resolving to complete all my personal projects, work out more regularly, or pay off debts. Nor have I made up my mind to eat more healthily, get more sleep, or reduce stress. In fact, I’ve tried to not really make any definitive determinations about these or any of a myriad of other vague-but-worthwhile-sounding goals that probably resonate with most of the people out there.

Don’t get me wrong: these goals are all ones that I would very much like to achieve, even all this year if possible, at least partially. The thing is, though, these kinds of goals are all about being “better” in some way. And quite honestly, as a New Year’s resolution, I don’t think that will help me all that much.

So I’ve got another idea. Instead of resolving to be better in some area of my life, I resolve to completely forget about being better and to just go forward without hesitation.

I won’t worry – as I’ve so often tended to in the past – about whether or not I’m doing the best that can be done; I’ll just strive to do the best that I can do. I likewise won’t ever feel like I have to do something flawlessly the first time around; I’ll remind myself that pretty much everyone can find something they don’t like about themselves or their own work and I’ll accept that improvements usually can be and even have to be made, and I’ll be thankful for any chance to do so.

I won’t focus on what I don’t know, but instead will focus on what I do know, and I’ll rejoice in the fact that there’s so much more to learn; I similarly won’t think that I can’t do something until I know “enough” about a particular subject. I mean, sure, there are plenty of times when you can’t just get up and go, when you have to know something about what you’re doing before you can begin, but more often than not the best way to get that knowledge is to just brace yourself and dive in. I won’t be afraid to take my own advice and do the same, figurative mask and snorkel at the ready.

Finally, I definitely won’t feel like I have to do everything all at once. As many goals and dreams and plans as I might have, I’ll take things one at a time, and once and for all I’ll recognize that I can’t do anything until I start something; doing everything might be unrealistic but that’s no reason not to try.

And actually, in that last little independent clause we have in a nutshell the crux of my rather long and perhaps somewhat convoluted post. I am and have always been a perfectionist. When I do things, I want to do things well. Really well. But the perfectionist’s dilemma – my dilemma, too much of the time – is that the oft-quoted axiom that “practice makes perfect” is, actually, a lie.

“Perfection” is impossible, and if you take perfectionism too far, you’ll take that inescapable impossibility too much to heart and either never start something – because, hey, it (and/or you) will never be perfect, why bother? – or you’ll start but then not follow through. This can lead to ambitious projects being left on the backburner until blackened to a crisp and other nice-but-lofty goals left by the wayside and forgotten.

But no longer. Striving for perfection is, if you’ll pardon my language, damned counterproductive, and I want no part in it. This year, I will strive instead to just do, without the worry.

This year, I resolve to be imperfect.

Well, here it is. I set up my blog a little over 3 hours ago, and here I am at 2:30 in the morning writing my “first post” (with thanks to the often rather eccentric insanity of Slashdot for inspiring the term and its connotations).

So now, after spending much time fiddling with WordPress configuration options, reading documentation, and just generally figuring out what all I can do with this blog now that it’s finally up and running, I find myself forced to weigh my choices. Should I stay up and write the long and insightful post that I’d imagined as the key ritual of this “inauguration” of my wonderful and long-anticipated (by me, anyway) blog? Or should I give in and go to bed?

…

Yes, actually, I think I will have to go with the latter choice; bed it is.