CaptainOrange

The Preamble I've just spent what could have been a nothing-to-do weekend at a work-sponsored class on storytelling. Having known about it for a month or so, I have been living in anticipatory dread the entire time. I didn't really know what I thought was going to happen. On reflection, it was a problem I have been dancing around all year. I'm scared to let myself down. If I don't blow away expectations, I feel like a failure. No pressure there. To combat this problem, my usual solution is to lower expectations so that it is easy to surpass them. That is likely familiar to some of you. Perhaps you are someone who eats expectations for breakfast. I'm working on it. For right now, I lost not a few nights of sleep worrying about what story I might do and thinking more than once about giving a co-worker, Jim, my spot in the workshop. I'm sure he wishes he could have taken part. Having managed to go, in the end, I wouldn't trade it for anything. And I didn...

Alert! Feelings laden paragraphs ahead. If you are hear to read about me being a mad scientist or climbing something, turn around and go back to the site with the fluffy kittens doing what fluffy kittens do. I've been thinking about The Quest for a long time -- something like 21 years now. I've found that as time passes, it has become increasingly hard to hold to some of my own ideals. How do I continue to strive, to seek, to find year after year? One thing that has really bothered me lately is that activities that I once enjoyed have stopped filling me up. I feel bored. I don't care. This doesn't matter. It started out being a seasonal depressive thing (which I do believe contributes to the severity), but this last year, there were elements that stayed with me all summer. I thought it was a failing in my person -- that somehow I had changed for the worse and couldn't make myself feel the way I felt when I was twenty. This kind of thinking has never seemed like ...