Hello, World!

It would seem it's about time to bust the wheels off my training blog and start this thing up in earnest.

Coming home from my brother's place tonight, I started to feel this creeping urge. I get like this when I'm stressed -- and I am, about money and my car, and overtired from the move -- where I want some adventure or some action to cut through the depression. In the past I've just indulged some genre fantasty: eat pie at an all night diner, take a midnight walk, explore some 24-hour store. But they're ultimately passive outlets.

I've been lamenting my productivity. I have such an inflated sense of my potential, that my seeming failure to produce anything meaningful or successful or at all has been weighing heavily upon me. In new media/web 2.0 terms, I'm merely a content consumer. Bottomfeeder.

I've had most of this -- what? 10 paragraph -- blog entry done since I was on the highway (in my head) and yet already I've surfed the web, watched TV, had a snack...

And lately, I swing between bitter and mournful about it: Listening to Sufjan Stephens and begrudging him every brilliant song, or or getting weepy at every maudlin plot I flip past.

Full disclosure: I remember the exact moment my teenage concept of immortality was shattered: It was the second seizure. The first one had been a fun anomoly; a vacation that began on the floor outside my parents' bathroom and ended with the VIP treatment at Mom's hospital (Prime rib from a hospital cafeteria?)

But, from the second data point one might take the dangerous step of extrapolating a curve.

At the time they weren't seizures, but unexplained lapses in consciousness. "Maybe you're pushing yourself too hard," friends suggested. In the absence of any sort of medical opinion on the subject this took on added weight. But I'm blaming my friends -- they weren't suggesting anything I hadn't come up with long before visiting hours.

And from that insidious meme, a long trend of disengagement began. 4.0s seemed far less worth the risk of an all-nighter. My "plate" became inexorably "full" to new activities.

Annie and I have discussed it: It was something that worried her early in our relationship, and something that secretly terrifies me. She's really helped me get my hands around the issue... we've defined my personal goals, outlined my strengths and weakenesses, but haven't really managed to successfully address the root issue: how does one reclaim industry and initiative without, well, industry and initiative?

Tonight, I think I may have reframed the problem in a constructive way. Maybe it's not a matter of retracing my steps, doubling back on the path I've chosen. Statis isn't a path and I cannot retrace immobility. Maybe I'm still laying on some hallway floor, suddenly conscious of the weight of my mortality, unable to get back up. Pressing my life-alert button with all my might.

Okay, okay. That last part was just a clumsy effort to save this from emo territory.

Anyway, here I am, pulling an all-nighter to write a blog entry, the most dangerous thing I can come up with.

So, blogging. I guess I'll have to re-focus my hypocritical disdain to Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic now.