Day 30: Achievement Unlocked

TA DA!!  30 Consecutive Days of Blogging!

I clearly knew this day was coming, I've been struggling to decide what level of celebration I needed to perpetrate.  The line above, yeah, that's pretty much it.  That's what I can really manage right now.

It's not that I'm not proud of myself, I am glad to have met my challenge, I really feel like it's quite an achievement, and I'm proud of MOST of the posts I've made.  But, I'm busy.

Moreover, as glad as I am that it's over, I don't really want it to be over (cognitive dissonance, anyone?).  As the challenge progressed I made a conscious decisions not to remark on any milestones (10 straight, 15 straight, 20 straight day) along the way.  I did this because I never wanted this to be primarily about the challenge or the finish line.  I still don't.

I'm not ENTIRELY sure what I want out of blogging now.  I still want a place to be reflective, yes, but I have to be honest about my selfish desire to acquire an audience, to get feedback (positive, hopefully, but even negative is nicer than silence).  I loved watching the page views creep up over the 850 mark (so far) over the thirty day period; I loved hearing that people enjoyed my work.  A person could really get addicted to that. 

At the same time, a part of what I want to do with this blog is incongruent with working to keep an audience.  If I'm too aware of who will be reading what I'm saying and how they're going to react to it then it defeats the purpose.  I suppose this is the conundrum that artists face all the time (and no, I'm not vain enough to consider this blog to be art, I'm just saying I get where artists must be coming from). 

I was listening to a Nerdist podcast a few weeks ago featuring Chris Hardwick with guest Penn Jillette in which Penn was expounding upon his expertise on what it means to be a performer.  He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, `the audience doesn't WANT you to NEED them, they simply want you to be good enough to want'.  So, there you go, I just need to be good, and always better.

That said, I'm not certain that forcing myself to make daily posts is conducive to making the best posts possible; either for the purposes of self-reflection or for those of writing good and entertaining content.  At the same time, a schedule might not be a bad thing and can be great motivation.  So, I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to continue this experiment, but I'm going to limit my posting schedule to Mondays and Thursdays only.
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In other news, today I painted the walls over at the new place for six hours, left from there and went to watch the students in my robotics class present their final exam projects, came home and ate dinner, and then went back to paint for another two and a half hours.  So, for those of you keeping track, that's eight and one half hours of painting today.  Still not done.  Wow.  I wish it weren't taking so long.

I painted a lot today because I won't be able to paint for the next few days.  I've got two exams tomorrow, one at eight in the morning, and one at two in the afternoon.  (I also wish I didn't have an 8 a.m. exam; I'm NOT a morning person, at all.) 

My peers the opposite of envy me; is the opposite of envy, pity?  If so, my peers definitely pity me.  It's bad enough to have to wait until Friday the week of exams to finish (both because professors want to be done as much as students and because it doesn't leave much slack time between the end of the exam and when grades absolutely HAVE to be posted).  It's worse still to have an 8 a.m. exam on Friday.  It's WORSE STILL, to have both and 8 a.m. exam AND a 2 p.m. exam because then you don't even have the pleasure of leaving work early.  It's going to be an all-day marathon.      

Still, at least I'm not TAKING those exams, that would suck!  So, you know, perspective, I can has it.