Category Archives: goals

I made a book.

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My Blurb book

I made a book. It’s not perfect (I think the dimensions are too big), but I like it. It’s a collection of photos and writing I created between June 2010 and August 2011. It was a very tumultuous, beautiful, difficult, humbling and profoundly amazing time for me.

The book covers a very distinct chapter of my life. A period when every aspect of my life was up in the air. I accepted some of my weaknesses and made some significant changes to how I live these precious few moments of time I will be here.

Maybe that sounds a bit melancholy. But that is what motivates me. That is how I motivate myself. My time is precious because, by nature’s standards, it will be short. How short? I don’t know. I think 80-90 years sounds about right. But no one knows for sure. Everything is a river. Time is just flowing by. What am I doing to make the most of it? I don’t always know, but I’ve tried to stop letting fear or “the way you are supposed to do things” get in the way.

In the past year, I became a more solid person. Solidly grounded and focused on how I can surround myself with people I love and meaningful experiences. I’ve also become more at peace with the person I am: sometimes gregarious and silly and sometimes quiet and introspective. Making that peace was a journey that at times broke me into little pieces. I’ve collected some of those pieces as well as the mementos from that journey in this book.

Let me be clear: I didn’t solve any existentialist dilemmas in my little book of corny poems and sunset photos. I simply used a couple of different forms of art (writing and photography) to document the thought processes by which I learned a little bit more about myself.

Maybe there is something in this book you can relate to. That would be incredibly humbling and neat for me. If there isn’t? That’s ok too. Either way, thank you for taking a look.

You don’t have to buy it to see it. You can flip through it on Blurb.com

One less habit

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The fingernails of my left hand

The (now) longer nails on my left hand.

Some time in late September of last year, I stopped biting my fingernails. I don’t know the day, hour and minute at which I ceased a lifelong habit, but I can tell you I’m quite pleased with myself anyway.

I’ve been hesitant to mention it here, in large part because of the significance. I bit my fingernails for my entire life. I’m pretty sure I stopped sucking on my digits as a toddler and started to bite my nails off the next day. It was an activity as normal as breathing for as long as I can remember.

What’s puzzling to me about it is the unceremonious manner in which this habit ended. I simply stopped without thinking about it. Seven days later I had to find a nail file and shape my newly-grown orange peelers. (Luckily, I inherited an antique “Diamond Deb” nail file from my grandma. It’s actually coated in diamond dust, making it an amazing file.) My new habit is filing my nails once a week.

Maybe we don’t always need to face our bad habits head-on. Maybe it’s possible to do an end-run around them. Or maybe we should focus on our good habits and they’ll crowd out the bad ones? Maybe there is a lesson here related to identifying my goals. I don’t know for sure, but I’m quite happy to have shed this habit.

Acknowledge the obvious

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GNOME!! If you haven’t been here in awhile (that should be 99.5% of you, I’m guessing), you might notice that I’ve turned this site upside-down and shaken it like Michael Jackson handing babies out of a hotel window. It was time. I was due.

This time last year, I set an ambitious goal of writing 50 blog posts in 2008. I wrote 7. The last one I wrote was in August. That’s four months between blog posts. The real shame of it is it doesn’t reflect my online life, which is spread across no less than 4 social networks I use daily. Engaging in those communities takes my time away from here, leaving this site to become a placeholder for one forgotten aspect of my life: writing. One could show up here and assume I fell off the face of the earth sometime after August of 2008.

So, with all of that in mind, I decided to go Apollo 13 on this site and take drastic measures in order to bring it back down to earth.

The Changes

  • Removed the blog listing from the front page. From now on, the latest post will be teased on the front page. But since I don’t write as much, it can’t have the whole page. I do aspire to write more in 2009, but acknowledging the obvious, I realized if the site is primarily focused on an act I only perform 7 times in 365 days, it’s going to look dusty and old most of the time.
  • Added links to most of the online communities I belong to. I know that list is long. I’m not active on more than 4 of those sites on a daily basis. But I’ve realized that I have friends (in real-life or online) on all of them. You may use one of them or all of them. Friend me up on any of them you choose. The goal for me is to allow people who find me interesting to find me in the context they prefer. You don’t have to come to me, instead we meet in our favorite community.
  • Aggregating the other stuff here. For the online content I create most often, I’ve collected a short list of the recent items I’ve added to those sites here.

That’s it. I could go on about how I painstakingly chose a new font for the header (Optima Pro Demi Bold). Or, how I had a colorful design comp and abandoned it for the minimalist look of grays and white. But it seems rather trite to use what has become a rare event to tell you how awesome it is that my tweets are now on the home page. That said, the site is somewhat rough around the edges, so bear with me. I consider all redesigns on this site to be an iterative process (read: search and archives will come back, I promise).

Part of Something Bigger

This redesign is the first accomplished goal of a process I’ve initiated called acknowledging the obvious. I wasn’t writing blog posts frequently enough to warrant blog posts being the center piece of my website. I acknowledged that and redesigned the site to accommodate things I do more often. I’m not sad about it and I’m not going to beat myself up for not writing more. I’m just adapting to the obvious. The process has been quite liberating because I used to avoid doing anything here because I wasn’t writing. Now, I can relax because casual visitors will at least be able to see that I’m not dead and they can find me in other places if they wish.

In acknowledging the obvious, I plan to remove some mental barriers I’ve had toward accomplishing some long term goals in 2009. I do plan to write about those barriers here (but as you’ve no doubt come to understand, don’t hold your breath :-). For me, the year 2008 was simply to surreal of a year to not record somewhere.

Cheers,
Rob