So this turned out pretty much as I assumed it would: a failure. Haha. I’m not very good at keeping up with things.
I am, however, getting better. With that in mind I have decided to make a second attempt at this blog, albeit in a slightly different manner. Instead of a blog keeping track of my reading progress it’ll instead be a blog of just about everything, including my reading progress as well as a few other goals I have.
Apparently, my new focus in life is self-improvement. I am an enormous, unfathomable dork for looking at it like this but I sincerely believe I have important my goal-oriented new lifestyle from my World of Warcraft addiction. WoW always held a strong fascination for me in large part (and this is something I’ve believed all along) because it has very tangible, accessible goals, both long and short term. The feeling of immediate progress, of being able to track the multiple goals you have going for your multiple characters was orgasmic to me. I love progress. I love watching loading bars fill up. I am freaky like that. In that way, WoW was like a paradise to me. Some of the things that turned others off — grinding, farming, reaching one goal just to chase another — were some of the things that turned me on the most. I loved meeting all kinds of different goals on different characters and wished only that I had more time to devote to attaining more goals. Eventually, however, my mind finally accepted the long-known realization that these goals ultimately gave me nothing. I might get a million billion gold or have a whole cadre of level 70’s but this translated into nothing in my real life. Once I finally kicked that bucket for good, after steadily losing interest in all of my goals and quitting the game and staying quit, I did something pretty outlandish.
I imported my WoW lifestyle into my real lifestyle. This sounds retarded, and I’ll admit it pretty much 100% is. But I feel in many ways that it is true. My mind is still progress oriented – I LOVE making to-do lists almost as much as I love crossing things off of them. I have literally kept multiple to-do lists of the same things simply so that I could cross items off multiple times. So I have been using that to encourage myself to meet tangible, worthwhile self-improving goals in my everyday life.
Of course this is not nearly as easy as it was on World of Warcraft. Meeting even the smallest of real-life goals takes lots of more time and tons more effort than its virtual counterpart. It’s still difficult to encourage my naturally lazy self to do things that I really, really just don’t want to do. It’s even more difficult to encourage my naturally lazy self to do things that I really, really just don’t want to do after I’ve already spent my time doing other responsible things. The worst part, easily, has been conquering the “Okay, I did this responsible thing, so now I can slack off” mentality. This idea is okay, sometimes, since all work and no play makes me want to shoot myself, but is hardly practical for me to make any headway into my multiple goals.
Anyway, I ramble. I ramble because one of my goals is to write more. What about? Anything. Seriously, just anything. Nonfiction, journal entries, fiction. Paragraphs, sentences, poems, blogs. Blurbs about what I’m up to. Quips of what I’m thinking about or doing. What I’m reading. How I’m progressing. To-do lists that I’ve crossed off. Anything and everything – I would just like to get in the habit of spitting something in here about three times a week… hopefully more. We’ll see how that goes.
