Thursday, November 18

So I put a bunch of videos up on youtube (over there I'm godskid8256). I've written and taken pictures all my life. Were it not for overly conservative guidance counselors, it's something I would have pursued more formally. Gordon Parks was my idol before and during prep school.

Instead, I wandered through life, learning that I wasn't good at being the square peg jammed into the round hole (or vice-versa). Yeah, even when stoned out of my gourd I could often do better at things than people who loved them with a passion (I'm the person who took first year calculus in high school because I liked the pictures the equations made. When I tried to do it in college because I was dating an engineer, I failed at it miserably). Excellence is pretty much a personal habit. Or at least it was prior to the days of Kaplan, surgically-precise information gathering, and the internet and resulting information overload. Excellence is still a habit, it's just that there are now so many things to distract one from the normal execution of one's habits.

All of which leads me to wonder why I'm so abysmally bad with a videocamera. I get that I'm recording life and am not editing it, but my GOODNESS! There's lots of panning and unsteadiness -- sure I was using a pocket videocam and didn't bother to read the instruction manual, but still!

It's 1 pm, and I've done a day's work already. You can actually get nearly a day's work done between 7 and 10 am, which frees up the rest of your day to play den mother and traffic cop. I like getting stuff done. Which is great, because there's LOTS to do here.

Already looking at other trips back to the Middle East. I also need to start checking my portfolio a bit more closely; I think it would be cool to be retired and go on a trip every quarter or so. But that means you have to be able to finance it, which means I shoulda started yesterday.

Considering that I didn't have anything to say today, it looks like I've written enough. Check out my videos on Youtube. Pray that I'll get better with my little videocamera.