The other day on twitter Jeph Jacques, creator of the fantastic webcomic Questionable Content, talked about how a cable guy told him that his house was not in their “serviceable area” simply because he didn't feel like installing cable at that time. Jeph tweeted that he “never woulda gotten to where [he is] today if [he] only did comics when [he] 'felt like it.'” When I read it I nodded along, as if people can see me nod in agreement with them over the internet, in outrage at those people who don't do their jobs simply because “they don't feel like it.” There have been many times when I didn't want to go to work or, while there, didn't want to work as hard as I should but I've never just ignored things because I “didn't feel like it.” I did fail to turn in one paper last semester because I couldn't organize my thoughts and I couldn't pull the paper together but that was more due to my freaking out, not my willfull decision to “just not do it.” But Jeph's comment about not being where he is today if he only made comics when he felt like it got to me. I realized that I'm a person who often doesn't follow through on the things I want to do in life because I'm scared, or tired, or "just don't feel like it." I will do my work when it's for a class or a job but I often fail to do things that don't have a firm deadline. I do not regularly blog anymore and I don't share the things I want to because “I don't feel like it.” Either I'm “too tired to write” or I “just want to veg out in front of the tv” or I tell myself that “no one will care what I think anyway so why bother creating anything.” It's kind of a bullshit line of reasoning, really. Why should anyone care about what I could create since I haven't created it yet. It makes me wonder where I could be now if I hadn't basically pissed away the last ten years never really pushing myself. I want to be a Captain Picard one day, not Lt. Picard. Things are going to change.
For as much as I hemmed and hawed last semester about the merits of going back to school to finish the degree that I'm not sure is going to be useful to me I went back. I'm taking two awesome classes. One on Gothic literature and how gender works in the genre – and one called “Queer Media Studies”. I'm kind of cheating taking the QMS class because it is far from my first class in GLBTQI Studies but I really like the instructor and, to be fair, we're reading a lot of articles that I've not read before. Also, we're going to talk about queercore and zines and media representation of the queer community. It made me feel as happy as I was five years ago when I was a theatre major and took classes about queer theatre performance and performance artists. (Although I've grown up a bit in the past five years. I'm not nearly as asinine as I was back then. I wish there was a way to apologize to my former theatre professors for essentially being crazy without being all weird and shit). It's like getting paid to go play. Wait, I'm paying for class credit. So I'm paying to go play. Wait, what? Well, anyway...
But going to class yesterday and then reading Jeph's tweets kind of lit a fire under me. Either I can continue to sit here and complain and mope or I can push myself to be different. Therefore, Monday through Friday there will be a blog post about something I've been thinking about. I am going to force myself to share my thoughts about the things I study in an effort to not only become a better writer but also to show the world – the part that visits blogspot and cares what I have to say – what I'm about. I have no delusions that I'm going to be the next “big thing” or that anyone past my small group of friends and acquaintances will really care about this thing but what else am I going to do? Keep talking to the cats? No way.
*Shut up. I can only quote U2 so many times before it just becomes obnoxious.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment