Welcome back listeners, please come inside and take a seat. Rest a moment and perhaps listen to some friendly conversation while you remain. As may be obvious from the rather plain title, I plan on conducting business in a slightly different way than I have up till recently. I am taking a break from talking about the past to ruminate on current events in my life and how they are going to affect this blog for the next few weeks.
First and of foremost importance, my female companionship and I are now officially on Spring Break time. This means that we have a little over a week of freedom to be secluded from reality as we know it. As mentioned last week, this will be accomplished by travelling to and lounging about in the grand locale of Lisbon, Portugal. Before I continue, I want to contemplate that sentence, that preceding sentence. I have a job sponsored week free from responsibility and I am going to spend it crossing a continent and experiencing a completely different culture. When did this become reality? How did I end up in such a inconceivable place in my life? Try not to get the wrong idea, I am not attempting to inflate my ego or inspire jealousy. It is one of those sentences that I never contemplated me being able to say casually. It serves to show just how different my life has become in just eight months. Back in small town Oregon I was a homebody who held on to vague notions of nebulous futures exploring a wider array of experiences. In a shorter time than I would have thought possible, I am here and will soon be there. I guess it is difficult to see your life altering as the seconds go by. You don’t experience the curvature of the earth below your tread. It takes a moment to get out of your own experiences to really reflect on the direction of life. Me, the person who lived his whole life watching, reading, and listening to tales of adventure, I get to have some of my own. That’s cool. Ok, I may be bragging just a little bit.
However, to complicate matters more than they needed to be, procrastination intensifies. Due to my powers of chronic procrastination, I have created a convergence of events, essentially a nexus point of due dates all coming together right before I make my date with the Atlantic coast. Without going into too great of detail…
You know that old and tired joke where everyone forgets to do their taxes until the last minute? Well then, call me an overused punch line. Because I am some kind of machine specially designed to do things later than it should, I managed to wait until the night of April 13th before even beginning the filing process. It’s a good thing that I am a very organized person who wouldn’t dream of moving thousands of miles away from home without having all of my important paperwork on hand. It must be strange being the kind of person who has to do paperwork until 1:00 A.M. and have an hour long phone call with their mother in an effort to find one piece of paper hidden in the depths of a filing cabinet. Definitely wouldn’t want to be that kind of person.
In addition to that little bundle of shenanigans there was packing left to be done in the morning, Airbnb hosts to be contacted, and boarding passes to be found. It has been slightly hectic. Now, luckily that is all finished and behind me. The only thing that I have left to do before I am free to go is this post. With zero words written and only a few hours until liftoff this post is going to be more than a little bit rushed. It will also be somewhat shorter than the example I have been setting with my last few posts.
That does bring me to a point that I wished to touch on briefly. This blog is a personal passion project, albeit one on a public stage. Despite the amateur nature of the work, I do wish to present the best product I can. Each week I have been dedicating a fair amount of time to writing and editing these posts into a form suitable for human consumption. Recently, I may have become a little overenthusiastic about inflating my word count. As I try to produce one of these a week I feel like this increase in quantity has left me with very little time to dedicate towards the editing and revision of my writing. I am interested in conducting a little experiment. I wish to challenge myself to reverse trajectory and shorter entries with a higher level of polish. Will it work, who knows? I began this venture in an effort to achieve self improvement. In this spirit I hope to continue onwards into the future. If this alteration goes well, there may be more changes to the formula. Yes, I do realize the irony in expressing my concerns over lack of quality assurance in an essay that was by its very nature rushed and barely edited.
Well, this appears to be all the time I have to work with today, and Portugal awaits. Wish me luck in my travels and as I expand mental horizons. The skies await me, and they do so with a pleasant countenance. Adventure abounds, and I intend to seize it. For those of you seated on your couches or at coffee shops, commuting or cohabitation all of you coming to the web seeking literary fulfillment, I wish you good day, good night, and good reading.
The Miscellaneist 