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This time, the New Year thoughts

Started: Tuesday, January 2, 2001 00:29

Finished: Tuesday, January 2, 2001 02:08

It just seem like a good idea to split this off into a separate rambling. I'm not sure I'm really going to have enough content this time to constitute a full rambling, but we'll see. I always manage to spit out something or another.

It's January 2 already. Not enough hours in that day for certain. I was planning (hoping) to have the room all fixed up, the rambling content finished, maybe (very maybe) some new code uploaded for the Collective, and perhaps a much celebrated GPL release of the base web and Content Collective code ready. And be in bed by now. Hah!

For the past year, on the first of every month, I have mulled over the New Year's resolutions made on January 1, 2000. I was thinking about it a little today, and last night as I drove home in Tobias. This time, I may disappoint some readers when I say that I don't really have anything in the way of resolutions to make.

Sure, I could try making something up. Something that sounds good. Try to shoot for a result that I may or may not be capable of acheiving. A result that I may or may not even want to have two, four, or six months from now.

What you don't have, you don't need it now
What you don't know, you can feel somehow

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A topic I promised myself I was going to let rest for a while. That was until I got Argo up and running again today, started to browse slashdot, and bumped into this thread, which led me to this site, and I don't think I could have put this as as elequently if I had rambled it myself. But there are perhaps some people in this world who are faring well. Congratulations to them.

(No, there is no long redundant spiel coming here. Just a paragraph full of links. And I do intend to vulturize the above site further when time is more permitting.)

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The word "goal" turns me off. On an instinctual level, perhaps partly due to past associations. It conjures images of school teachers at the beginning of a semester, getting ready to dispense bits of foreshadowing about the homework to be inflicted in the coming months. (That is one thing I looove about being where I am in the employment sector. Go to work all day, come home at night, and not have to worry or feel guilty about ANY of what one could or should be doing during the evening hours.)

Hm... Given the time that is passing, I'm getting a surprisingly small volume of content written. But I am consuming a lot of sunflower seeds. :)

I like to live life minute to minute. Need food? No prob. Jump in the car and go to Taco Bell. Problem solved. No car available? (Not the case recently, but a year ago, yes.) Jump on the next bus. No buses running? Walk. (Which I did do many a time to keep up my now defunct weekly movie viewing tradition while residing in Lincoln, Nebraska.)

That was a rather random bit of mental jumping.

Historically, I have not often made long term life plans. Or even short term. I have considered this trait to be a strength, not a weakness. When I really need or want something, I take the necessary steps to get it, sometimes in a chaotic fashion. I don't worry about what things will be like in five years. I figure that when whatever is going to happen happens, I'll deal with it then.

Therefore, when someone says, "Describe what you see your life as being five years from now," my response is either a blank stare, or a load of BS that I know is BS. Because I don't think that way. I see things as they come, and act upon the knowledge I have of the world around me as it currently exists.

This doesn't mean I don't chase a distant target when I find one worth going after. Find a direction to head in because there is something to be gained by traveling that distance. If nothing else, see a star in the sky and follow it.

What I don't do is say that I will always be heading that direction. I may change course entirely if something else -- coming from the internal or the external -- presents itself, or there is some facet about the way I'm going that is not working.

The direction I found myself going at the beginning of last year was NOT working. So I decided to try a different way. The way of making resolutions. This time, I'm not. And I don't see the need to try to conjure an arbitrary target to follow when none yet exists.

On the topic of finding what one needs when one needs it, I feel the need for sleep coming on at an exponential rate. Time to discontinue before things really degenerate. So much for cohesive content. Cutting...