I have no less than 20 entries queued up, but they're all crap. They're woebegotten crap. They're customer service epic fail crap. They're rambling stories that make no sense crap. I save them, shove them in the vault, and swear that I'll come back in a few hours, and edit them to something vaguely resembling coherency.
I never do. Because I'm a perfectionist, and they're crap.
All the while, the quadzillion other blogs I read keep racing past me, and 50 Shades of Fucking Grey is a bestseller.
I almost maybe totally believe that even the first draft shit I crank out is better than 50 Shades of Fucking Grey.
So. I can either:
Keep convincing myself that I'm a shit writer, and never write anything, ever. (This plan is awesome, insofar as it satisfies my Freeze instinct, which gives me that mild pleasure of base satisfaction by doing a thing that my body is naturally inclined to do when coping with difficulties, ie, nothing. It is largely a shit plan.)
Keep writing, sporadically, and burying everything I write in a poorly tagged, poorly organized slushpile where it will never see the light of day, but, hey, I WROTE things! (This plan is awesome, insofar as it satisfies my Flight instinct, where I see something wrong then scamper away in the other direction, because dealing with things is haaaaaaaard. It is also largely a shit plan.)
Publish ("publish," lol) things anyway, even if they're not perfect, because some content is better than no content? I don't know. I can't bring myself to subscribe to that one, because putting imperfect, poorly constructed entries (like this one! Oh, the irony!) out towards a bunch of internet strangers (web crawling bots) makes me feel like I'm failing. Letting someone (mostly myself) down.
I try to cram this in to last year's mantra of Do One Thing, and my brain overloads. How can I Do One Thing, when that one thing isn't good enough, isn't coherent enough? Of course, if I listened to that part of my brain while I was skating, I'd never do anything, ever.
So I'm publishing this, even though it's self indulgent and whiny, and I'm hoping that something about that action will break the gates, and allow me to start actually pushing out some of the writing that I've been doing.
It can't be worse than 50 Shades of Grey.
Showing posts with label inspiration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inspiration. Show all posts
Monday, July 9, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
For Later WREFerence...
I'm working a science conference down in Denver this week. Mostly I curate the presentations, and the scientists yell at me, since none of them can be bothered to read directions.
Some of them surprise me, though.
One man came all the way over here from Guangdong, China, to present his findings on Something Something Technical Something Solar Something Brewery. I don't speak Science, and he barely speaks English, and so conversations have been difficult.
On the first day of the con, he had tremendous difficulty figuring out the process for registration. We all tried to be helpful, but it was mostly a lot of hand waving and that thing that Americans do when, when someone can't understand us, we just talk slower and louder.
The next day, he chased a coworker and I down in the speaker's hallway, because he couldn't figure out where he was speaking. My coworker and I managed to deduce that he was presenting his paper in the Ignite format (20 slides, 15 seconds a slide) and immediately started to worry about him. We managed to convey his room number and date to him only through the gratuitous use of drawing alphanumerics in the air, and a lot of pointing at the schedule. Somehow, it all worked out. He was so thankful, he opened the box breakfast he'd picked up from somewhere, and began offering my coworker and I food by the handful. No matter how many times my coworker tried to be gracious and accept his gifts, there was always something else to be had. My coworker ended up with a fistful of bacon and another fistful of fruit. (I helped him eat it.)
We were just blown by the kindness and appreciation of this man, who had flown halfway around the world, knowing nobody, barely able to communicate with a whole other culture, to speak for 5 minutes at a tiny conference out in the mountains. His eagerness to meet people (we've since seen him palling around with many of the other conference attendees), his graciousness, and desire to learn (he is ALWAYS either in session or running to see something else) is incredible.
The next day, I walked into the staff room to find a bag of green tea sitting on my backpack. Confused, I turned to my coworker, looking at him quizzically. I'd been moaning about the lack of real tea near the conference center all week, so where had this miraculous gift come from? My coworker had run into our buddy that morning, who thrust this bag of tea at him, that he'd brought with him from his home provence and traveled around the world with, just to give it to a person who hadn't even gone out of their way for him , had simply been doing their job. My coworker, in turn, gave it to me. And when I heard the whole story from him, I started leaking happy tears, right then. I don't think our friend meant to be so pointedly thoughtful, but the serendipity of the gesture was just completely overwhelming to me.
I've found inspiration and strength in the strangest places this week - my new Chinese friend being one of them. In presenters eager for the challenge of an Ignite presentation, in my coworkers ability to function and be productive on less than no sleep, in their eagerness to work together and to get to know me and support me however they can, and even in the scientists, who are talking so far over my head I can barely keep up - but what I've learned has been incredibly insightful and even, dareisay, motivational.
Some of them surprise me, though.
One man came all the way over here from Guangdong, China, to present his findings on Something Something Technical Something Solar Something Brewery. I don't speak Science, and he barely speaks English, and so conversations have been difficult.
On the first day of the con, he had tremendous difficulty figuring out the process for registration. We all tried to be helpful, but it was mostly a lot of hand waving and that thing that Americans do when, when someone can't understand us, we just talk slower and louder.
The next day, he chased a coworker and I down in the speaker's hallway, because he couldn't figure out where he was speaking. My coworker and I managed to deduce that he was presenting his paper in the Ignite format (20 slides, 15 seconds a slide) and immediately started to worry about him. We managed to convey his room number and date to him only through the gratuitous use of drawing alphanumerics in the air, and a lot of pointing at the schedule. Somehow, it all worked out. He was so thankful, he opened the box breakfast he'd picked up from somewhere, and began offering my coworker and I food by the handful. No matter how many times my coworker tried to be gracious and accept his gifts, there was always something else to be had. My coworker ended up with a fistful of bacon and another fistful of fruit. (I helped him eat it.)
We were just blown by the kindness and appreciation of this man, who had flown halfway around the world, knowing nobody, barely able to communicate with a whole other culture, to speak for 5 minutes at a tiny conference out in the mountains. His eagerness to meet people (we've since seen him palling around with many of the other conference attendees), his graciousness, and desire to learn (he is ALWAYS either in session or running to see something else) is incredible.
The next day, I walked into the staff room to find a bag of green tea sitting on my backpack. Confused, I turned to my coworker, looking at him quizzically. I'd been moaning about the lack of real tea near the conference center all week, so where had this miraculous gift come from? My coworker had run into our buddy that morning, who thrust this bag of tea at him, that he'd brought with him from his home provence and traveled around the world with, just to give it to a person who hadn't even gone out of their way for him , had simply been doing their job. My coworker, in turn, gave it to me. And when I heard the whole story from him, I started leaking happy tears, right then. I don't think our friend meant to be so pointedly thoughtful, but the serendipity of the gesture was just completely overwhelming to me.
I've found inspiration and strength in the strangest places this week - my new Chinese friend being one of them. In presenters eager for the challenge of an Ignite presentation, in my coworkers ability to function and be productive on less than no sleep, in their eagerness to work together and to get to know me and support me however they can, and even in the scientists, who are talking so far over my head I can barely keep up - but what I've learned has been incredibly insightful and even, dareisay, motivational.
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