Time and talent

I'm over a quarter of a century old.

More than likely, I've lived over 1/3 of my life.

I really don't think I'm ever going to be wealthy, famous, of any particularly significant importance.
This, of course, is absolutely antithetical to what I was told growning up. I'm sure this is the case with most of my peers.

While I recognize that I'm not going to be great, I also recognize that I'm alive and I have an opportunity to take full advantage of the things I do enjoy; the things that are important to me.

While I try to make it a point to improve myself, I find myself doing self-destructive things.

While I try to make it a point not to waste time, I keep finding myself in the warm, violent, vegetable trance of video games.

While I try to be a nice person, I keep finding out that those alcohol-erased parts of my memory are full of assholery.



I have a list of things in which I am greatly interested, but never seem to pursue beyond cursory attention.



Mythology. So much of the western psyche has been influenced by mythology. We draw our social mores from previous norms, and those norms are established by the mythos of our ancestors. The seeds of our system of justice and what we find tolerable in society are sown in the mythologies of our mother nations (or her conquerors).

It's also humbling as a human to understand it has only been very recently in our history that we have started to make sense of reality. Most everything up until about 200 years ago was a question-mark covered with superstition shoveled on like so much manure.

The stories remain a testament to the capacity of human creativity.  It wasn't important that they didn't all make sense together. It wasn't too necessary for all of the characters to mesh and everything work out like a massive narrative.  It had to be a blast to invent myths. If anyone would like to collaborate in making a new pantheon of gods and goddesses, let me know. It would be a blast.

May Piscatolo, my god of washing dishes and folding socks, smile upon you.

Piscatolo is tempted to kill this man for eating under a tent.

Esperanto. The concept and the language itself are, to me, outstanding.  While it would make our lives easier to establish a global language, I'm afraid that it would ultimately lead to the deaths of regional dialects and national languages. Globalism, Linguistic Evolution and the Principle of Least Effort will eventually kill some of the more inefficient languages (I'm looking at you Finnish...)

Allow me to add some "teach yourself Esperanto" books to my amazon.com shopping cart...

 

 While it's clear that this child is hugging the planet, George W. Bush was not quoted as saying "That boy there is crushing the planet with understanding and community. Find him. You know what to do."

Music. I would like to be a musician of some sort, but I'm a little tone-deaf, kind of self-impatient, and can't keep time very well.

So.

That's probably not going to work out.

Me, circa A Past Life

Art. While I do engage in some artish stuff, I would like to develop myself as an artist. Partially so I can design my own tattoos in the future, and partly because I think it would make meetings a lot more entertaining. This isn't super-high on my list of priorities, but I do think that it would be handy to be able to draw worth a crap from time to time.

In addition to developing the talents I've already established (telling bad jokes, writing bad fiction, the occasional bout of self-destructive behavior, making toast),  I ought to put some more energy into these things I've listed. 

Before you know it, I'll be drawing mythology-based album art for my Esperanto-singing ska band.