Daydream Believer

If wishes were horses than beggars would ride, and if I were half as responsible to myself as I am to other people, I would be self-employed doing awesome things all day. 

I like to think that I’m a free spirit, but I’ve been made to face the fact (over and over and over again, in fact) that my particular spirit is rather like a small child:  It craves boundaries, direction, structure in which to exercise its gifts in a safe and loving environment. 

I will take on an extra project at work, but fail to shop for groceries until my third day of eating nothing but unadorned grits and Bisquick pancakes with ground pepper (for real), help a friend move or paint an apartment but leave my laundry until I’m channeling Pigpen from Charlie Brown.

Ask me to do something and give me a deadline.  I’ll do it in style, with gusto. I’ll dot all the I’s with little hearts, wrap up the results in fancy paper and bows, and deliver it to your door with a curtsy and a flourish.

I’m a diligent ditz, a spazzy robot.  I’m a freight train making all its stops, leaving the mangled corpses of a million grand schemes at every crossing.

Because there are plenty of things that I do just for myself: I play my ukulele, make songs, I sing, I sew, I write stories and essays, I walk, I cook elaborate and not-elaborate meals, I bake and decorate and bake more, I draw, I build simple electronics and modify the complex, I replicate (with varying degrees of success) everything that strikes my fancy from shoes to food to furniture.  I MacGuyver the shit out of things.  Our VHS library currently resides in a six-shelf condominium fashioned from packing tape and vintage Casio boxes. I build tiny people in tiny dioramas because tiny things are just so, so satisfying. 

But there’s the rub.  There are so many things I want to do just because I want to that if you put all of the tools for all of those activities in a room, I would end up running from station to station, flailing my arms like the robot from Lost in Space and finally collapse like a birthday girl when the cake wears off.

I'm heavily motivated by guilt, and I swallow my own excuses easily enough that I don't feel guilty when I let myself down.  A friend pointed out today that my goal shouldn't be to make myself feel guilty for breaking promises to myself, but to recognize that my personal projects deserve attention as much as outside jobs do.  It's two sides of the same coin, and she's right that the latter would be preferable, but I'm hoping for either at this point.

More than hoping, I'm baby-stepping in that direction.  In the past I've looked at this glaring flaw in my operations as something huge and wild and untame-able, something to be acknowledged with a sigh and shrug, but as I cruise into my "grown up" life still holding tight to teenaged optimism, I'm increasingly aware that that's both really counterproductive and ultimately soul-crushing. 

I like my job a lot as far as working for someone else goes, but as my ten year anniversary approaches, I shudder at the thought of another decade, or even another five years. 

When I started this blog I hinted at a big project in the works, and I'm happy to say that I'm actually working on it.  This is in no small part thanks to the community of wonderful people around me, friends and family and co-workers, who nudge me when I'm flagging keep my alternately inflated and flattened ego in reality.  In the end, it would be great if I could be accountable to myself, but I consider it a good start to be accountable to the people who care about and believe in me.

In the very short term, I'm working on a web project, aggregating all of my projects into one space.  It's a relatively passive endeavor, but it's useful for taking stock.  In the next month or two my art, this blog, Giant Marshmallow Pillow (it's not dead, it's sleeping), and my first stab at a commercial baking endeavor will find a new home together.  Like most things I do, it's happening in fits and starts because the ol' squirrel in my noggin keeps running off to check out other stuff, plus I decided to go all out and learn a little bit of WordPress coding just to make things interesting.

So thanks to everyone who humors me and challenges me and keeps me on track.  I'll be sure to give you all presents tied up in fancy paper with a curtsy and a flourish.

Meta-blog

Writing a blog is an interesting thing, made more interesting by the paranoia that keeps me from making it quite a known thing.  I've outed myself on twitter where I'm followed by a handful of people and only half of them actually know me, and I've selected a group of people I love and feel comfortable with to share on google+, but I've refrained from making the big social-networking leap of linking it to facebook because I'm a terrible self-conscious chicken.  I've been "outed" by friends who've liked posts more than once, and even that has felt scary, until I realize that the volume of stuff posted on facebook means that only a fraction of the people who see a link actually click on it. 

I guess my hangup is that I'm more than happy (I've become a stats-watcher, egad!) to share my writing, but I want it to be because people are interested in the topics as opposed to the idea that I have a blog.  I know I'm guilty of that voyeuristic inclination to read blogs just because I vaguely know someone,  but once I've checked it out, I only keep reading if it turns out they're as interesting as I thought they might be.  In many cases, I share a ton of friends and it would be a seemingly simple thing to just actually meet the writer, but in most cases my intense fear of being judged inadequate stands in my way and I just keep creeping around the interwebs like a stalker.

As it turns out, I loooooooove reading blogs and more than that, I love the comments and even commenting myself.  What I've found, though, is that the likelihood of me commenting is almost exactly inversely proportional with the likelihood of me meeting the author.  You live in another city? Great, let's talk!  You live in another state?  So much the better!  Getting thinky with strangers is my favorite!

At this particular moment, I'm aware of six people who read this blog with any regularity, one from comments, one from following, two 'cause they told me and two because I got feedback in another forum (an example: "DON'T GET RID OF THE TURTLE!!!!!!!!!!!").  I'm more than a little curious about how someone in Indonesia ended up here one time or why there've been multiple hits from Germany, but honestly, as readership has quadrupled this month, I'm curious about everybody.


All in all, though, I'm cool with anonymity.  As it is, my people-pleasiness occasionally makes me almost second guess what I'm writing.  Some people are here for the Deep Thoughts on Big Issues posts, some are here for Pictures of Awesome Shit posts.  Some are here...well, some are just along for the ride, I guess.  But every time someone tells me they like a particular thing, I start thinking I should do more of that thing.


Ultimately, although I'm embarrassingly excited to see that anyone at all is reading (despite my fear of telling people to read), I realize that this is kind of a personal exercise in...something.  Maybe I'm just translating the journals I kept for years into electronic format with an exhibitionist twist.  Maybe I'm flexing my writing muscles.  Maybe I'm really into the idea of imaginary friends.  Probably all of the above.  The question floats across my mind a fair amount, but I'm not actually very interested in figuring out the answer.  I like writing this.  I'mma keep doing it.  The end.  Thanks for reading.