The word of the week is
determination.
Nov 6 - Ten Years Of Failure
Yep, 10 years since I moved to BC...
So what?
It's a random benchmark, picking a
decade to look back on, and ultimately it's meaningless: you'll still get out
of bed the next day and go about your life as you've built it... or at least,
as you were inhabiting it currently.
Not much has changed the last 10
years for me: I'm still working a day job that's unfulfilling, pecking away at
my writing, and finding my eyes focused on my feet instead of the horizon too
many days of the year. Keeping my head down and plugging away may get me from
day-to-day, but it certainly doesn't with me out of the ruts that I track from
home to work and back again, with interludes in between for fun and recreation
to take my mind off the wandering I'm doing.
So what can you learn from 10 years of failing., you ask? Well... this:
Working hard comes naturally to me,
but as you can see from the image above, one's definition of work needs to
change regularly. Just as you build up muscle from a workout and need to keep
adding weight, the same applies for how you approach your work ethic: keep
gradually adding weight and testing yourself to see how you're holding up. Not
that you should keep adding stress, mind you, but rather focus on
accomplishing your tasks and then work up to new challenges that build on your
foundation of smaller successes.
This is one of my favorite quotes to
tell myself from time to time:
Only those who make mistakes have the
opportunity to learn, and I'm counting it into my stubborn head that Mistakes
Are OK: they don't mean I'm foolish, or stupid, or a Failure, but that I just
need to step back and find another approach to the problem(s) that I'm facing
at the time.
One step backward, and then move
forward from there.
Nov 7 – More Trolls? Yes!
Whoa! Some GOOD news? Love it!
Apparently Trollhunters was such a
big success for Netflix, that they've not only commissioned a second season( being released next month! )but
they've decided to split things off into two new sub-series, set in the same
world!
I'm a sucker for good writing, and Trollhunters
has it in spades, which speaks rather well for the new series as well. I'm
really anticipating some great Netflix-watching in 2018 or early 2019, when
these shows make it to 'air' so to speak.
Who knew how quickly the dynamic
could shift away from a dull-as-dishwater Hollywood system, too set it its
ways, towards dynamic online productions funded by Netflix and HBO... it's a
revolution!
Moar, Please!
Nov 8 – Groo-riffic
I'll share with you one of the
oddities of my life:
Good timing.
I've been collecting Groo comics for more than twenty years
now, and there's been a paucity of them around in local comic shops. Such that
in all those years, I've only managed to scrounge a half-dozen or so of the
forty issues I've been missing, many from the later years of the run when I
wasn't able to collect them regularly. While I could have hunted them down on
eBay, the prices weren't conducive to collecting( averaging $20 an issue, with shipping! )so I let it be.
A few months ago, I wandered into a
local used bookshop and as is my habit, made sure to check all the racks of
comics for Groo.
Imagine my shock when I found over
fifty of them for sale, in that one shop! I didn't have my list with me, but at
$1.00 an issue, I bought the lot though some were in rough shape... As it happens, there were more than a
few duplicates, but there were 26 issues there that I hadn't had before - what
a stroke of luck!
Now I'm down to about 10 issues to
find, which is pretty dang good, as my collection's looking fairly close to
complete now AND I might find the time in a year or two to read through them
all again:
Nov 9 – Smart and In Control?
Am I smart? Am I intelligent? How do I measure those?
All my life, I've been told that I'm
smart, that I'm highly intelligent and that has informed how I've looked at the
world: from a rational, logical and informed point of view.
But have you really know that your
smart person? Sure, you can take IQ tests, memorize trivia, get membership in
Mensa or do any of the thousand things to prove to yourself that you're not
just a smarter frogging among many the pond.
Being rational, I do like to turn to
science for answers when I'm not sure about things, and this week - while been
questioning my life - I came across a rather succinct list of Thirteen Signs You're Smarter Than You Realise:
one of the reasons I like this list
is because it doesn't attempt to quantify intelligence, but rather looks at the
whole picture of a person. In looking at the various items, I found that most
of them apply to me, in various degrees, and that's helpful.
Because even smart people need to do
a self check on their smarts on occasion.
Nov 10 – Healthy Rage
This is one of my favorite quotes
from any movie: "I'm always angry"
As regular readers of this blog may
be able to tell, I live in a constant state of frustration: with my health, my
work, my finances, my writing, my... whatever; There's always a list of things
that I've Got To Do Better, and it's never-ending.
Frustration often leads to anger, and
that stresses me out. Which I can't take anymore: there's no way in hell I want
my stress-induced chest pains to return, and so I've made great efforts to
learn how to channel my frustration-born anger into something else:
Motivation.
Don't like the way some things going
in your life? Change things up: you're the only one who can do it, because in
the World Of Adulting, nobody's going to step forward to add YOUR problems to
their own already-heaping basket of things.
You're on your own, as in so many
things in life, so best learn how to deal...
And sure, that can cause frustration,
probably heaps of it, especially if you're ALREADY working hard on finding
solutions. I know for myself, it feels like I'm trapped in a muddy pit some
days, clawing at the sides to get out but getting exactly nowhere as I slide
back down despite the howling energy I pour into the attempts at forward
motion. 'Work smarter, not harder' is a good mantra, yet some days I want to
punch whoever wrote it in the face and ask them exactly how smart one has to be
before you know it's time to just float in the mud and rethink things entirely.
Learning how to relax is also important, because without a firm foundation to
fall back on, that meant it is going to swallow you up too often.
Hmmm. Maybe I need to take up
professional mud wrestling?
Nov 11 – Remembrance
It's a pittance of time...
Nov 12 – Destination: Fun?
Sometimes you find deep meaning in
the oddest of places...
I was feeling rather down today, with
the gloomy weather not helping at all and despite spending the morning with my
lovely lady, the clouds over my head lingered.
So I went to see a movie: Thor
Ragnarok.
The movie was a fun romp, an action
spectacle with none other than the magnificent Cate Blanchett as the evil Hela,
chewing the scenery and kicking ass with aplomb: delightful! The plot was
straightforward, the CGI served the story instead of drawing attention to
itself, and everything just worked from the get-go.
The movie also spoke to something deep
inside me.
That, I think was a total surprise;
this isn't a drama, or a thinker's film by any stretch... but it was a perfect
fit for my mood and headspace, because of Thor.
Spoilers( mild )below.
In the film, Thor teams up with his
brother Loki and the Hulk in order to defeat Hela, with the usual banter and
bad-assery that we've come to expect from these characters. However, Thor grows
yet again as a character, perhaps the most yet to date, and in doing so he made
me realize that I'm facing many of the same choices that he did in the film.
For Thor, it was about letting the
unnecessary fade... about clinging to the past, or false notions of what he
was, in order to grow into what he truly IS, and needed to be for his people -
as well as for himself. Hard-won wisdom, won at great cost.
I need to be a writer, but I can't
support myself on that alone. I need to get a better income, but to do so only
to set aside my writing( yet again )to
focus on that job search as well as getting my home business up and running in
2018.
The pull between the two is tearing
me apart: write, or work to pay the bills?
I don't have the health or mental
strength to do both any more.
I'll leave it at that.
Nothing much more to say, save that a new week lies ahead, after a brief working-holiday tomorrow. See you again.
