Random Things I’d Like To Do
People often have the misconception that I’m a lazy or unmotivated person because I often reject societal norms/notions regarding things that you “simply have to do”. I don’t sweep my floors every week. Or even every month for that matter. Periodically, I get the urge to sweep the floor or collect the stack of soda cans on my desk, and that’s when such work gets done. I firmly reject the notion that I’m lazy though because I’m almost always doing about two things too many. The only difference is that I regard learning new things and recharging my internal emotional batteries to be important facets of my schedule that won’t get bumped for anything short of a national emergency. I often feel like I don’t have enough time in a week to do all the things that I want to do.
Readers of my ChangeLog have probably noticed my tendency to throw myself whole-heartedly into whatever pursuit currently has my interest. By the standards of others, I tend to shift wildly from, say, learning kanji to playing competitive Pokémon after a burst of activity and devotion so intensive that I would probably even scare someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The bad thing is that I never stop wanting to do the other things. I still very much want to become a fluent reader of Japanese. I want to knit fascinating things. I want to have a team of Pokémon capable of destroying any team they come across in addition to “catching ‘em all”. I just never get to seal the deal on any of it because there’s almost always a dozen other things calling me with the same intensity. As a result, I become rather like the summer weather here in Florida where the weather rapidly shifts from foggy to sunny to thunderously rainy.
In that vein, here’s a fun list of things that I fully intended to do/complete but just haven’t gotten around to…
1. Become a fluent reader/speaker of Japanese.
2. Finish/start the online manga collaboration that Allyson and I were going to do.
3. Knit a match for my alpaca sock.
4. Knit a sweater out of the eight skeins of yarn I bought on a whim at Michael’s.
5. Finish reading The Zen Teachings of Jesus.
6. Start daily sitting mediation.
7. Finish Final Fantasy X and start playing Final Fantasy X-2.
8. Finish building my OS X Cocoa-based EatWatch program.
9. Write a series of articles for Bactroid.net about The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths as interpreted by a Christian Buddhist.
10. Knit hats for all the people in my office for Christmas.
11. Learn how solar cells work and build a “something” that runs on solar power to prove to myself that I understand.
12. Learn all about statistics and then finish learning the rest of the stuff in my calculus book.
13. Read a novel in French.
14. Finish filling out that “100 Things About Me” meme that was going around a while back.
15. Knit a “something” with an Apple logo on it. (I’ve even designed the pattern already.)
16. Turn my Chibi Lucanth sketch into a full-fledged color illustration.
17. Do illustrations of all the presidents in the same style as my Reagan illustration.
18. Start a gag-a-day web comic.
19. Turn my fertility awareness program into an actual open source project/product.
20. Design and develop a 2D SNES-style open-source massively multimedia online role-playing game (MMORPG…you know, like Everquest or Final Fantasy 11).
Why am I not content to just crochet potholders or scrapbook? I hear that watching television is pretty popular as well these days.