I’ve been watching Breaking Bad for the last week or so (I’ve become completely addicted to it) and one of the scenes made me start to think hard enough that my mind wandered and I had to pause the program. In the scene, Jesse Pinkman is in a post-rehab meeting; and the meeting leader says something along the lines of, “You don’t come here to be a better person. You come here to learn to accept the person that you are.”
As I said, it sort of made me think. As far as I know, I accept the person that I am – but I’m not overly sure that I really know myself. I tried coming up with one-size-fits-all adjectives to describe me honestly, but none of them really fit. This exercise, of course, depressed the hell out of me and has caused me to wonder what the answer is to today’s blog entry: Who am I?
More specifically, what defines me? What is it that I like doing? What don’t I like doing? If money were no object, what would I do with myself? What talents, if any, do I possess and are any of them worth pursuing from an “I like this” point of view?
So I’ve been thinking about this on and off for the last few days and decided I’d try to figure it out – in bits an pieces – with this little FN blog. Not all at once, of course; and I’m not going to turn this thing into a tell-all (that’s what my original blog was becoming, which is why it is no longer open to the public). As I think of it, though, I’ll try to hash things out.
I really like photography. I do. I’m not that great at it (and I do wonder if getting my stupid eyes checked would help), but I honestly enjoy it. The feeling that I get when a really good photo comes straight out of my camera is one that I can’t describe. I want to show it to the world, hang it on my wall, and – perhaps most importantly (and most maddeningly) – do it again. When I see a great picture taken by someone else, I get jealous. Not necessarily because I didn’t take it, but because if I take the same picture – even if it’s just as good or better – it still isn’t mine. Somebody else did it first, and anything I get after that is just copying. Screwed up, huh? I might still love the shot that I get, but on some level I’m annoyed with myself because I didn’t think of it first.
In other news, I saw a suggested topic from one of those “Post-A-Day” blogs today that went something like, “How do you decide on your New Year’s resolutions?”
It’s an interesting question in an odd sort of way. How do you decide which resolutions about which to be resolute? Is that the question? Or is it, “Why do you keep making the same promises to yourself, year after year, whether publicly or not, when you never succeed in keeping those promises?” I mean, if I wanted to set a goal for myself and be relatively assured that I’d make that goal, it’d be something along the lines of, “I resolve that I will not wear soiled underwear during the entire 2012 calendar year.”
Now, this might be a no-brainer to some of you; but try keeping that goal when you’re camping for a few days in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a completely safe goal if that’s the case – but I could keep it by just going commando. So there’s that.
Those other goals, though (and I do make them – or at least think about them – every frigging year), have almost become pointless. I mean, if there’s this “resolution” that you want to make (and keep), then why haven’t you made it and kept it previously? Furthermore, most of the “big” resolutions are always negative. As in, “I will not smoke this year,” or “I will not drink this year,” or “I will not eat chocolate this year” (that last one, by the way, is one of those goals that I could fly through). And, with those negative goals, what does the person who makes them always do on December 31 – the day before those negative resolutions go into effect?
You got it. Mr. Resolve goes out of his way to binge like hell on the very thing(s) that he’s determined to give up. And he wonders why he’s already failed to live up to his expectations by about January 3rd.
Why not make some positive resolutions? “I will put $5 into a cookie jar every week.” That of course, doesn’t limit you from taking $3 out of the cookie jar every week…
Anyway, I don’t know what makes me think I’ll be able to do/not do something next year that I’ve been not doing/doing for long enough that I think I have to start/stop doing it; but I still make the damned resolutions every year, and I’m sure I’ll do it again in a few weeks.
This time, though, I think I’ll just make my resolutions on a weekly basis. Who knows? Maybe I can keep one going for 52 consecutive weeks.
TWD