Day After Independence Day.
“Everyone has one [insane] thing.”
The quote above is said by Mark Wahlberg as the Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler character in Boogie Nights. I doctored it to tailor to the subject of my first blog entry. Since the entries in this blog will most likely be more comedy related, I decided to get my personal therapeutic one out of the way. Here goes:
I have this thing with restarting my life at various points throughout the year. If I feel like I’m not being productive enough, I will mark off a key date in the future to start not wasting a single moment of time. And it can’t just be any ordinary date. It has to have some special quality attached to it. Some past examples from this year are March 4th (the only day when said aloud is a motivational speech in itself); March 20th (my birthday and the Spring equinox); June 7th (06-07-08); and Flag Day (a joke).
Inevitably, I will grow tired of checking off every entry on my to-do list and falter somewhere down the line. I will find myself not maximizing my full potential, like I will be watching YouTube videos of French parkour instead of watching YouTube videos on how to reverse our economic crisis. In a moment of awareness, I will realize my life is being wasted and set a new key date.
The most recent example of these key dates is this morning, the day after the 4th of July. The date is 7/5 which I justify as special because 75 is the number of years in the average life expectancy. This is especially special because it has the sense of death tacked on as a reminder (and a motivator). Although I have restarted several times, I’m optimistic about this one. I mean, I’m already three-fourths of the way through a blog entry. Spoiler alert.
If this one happens to fail to get me to self-actualization, then I have another one in my pocket. It’s August 1st (08-01-08; the zip code I grew up in in the SF Valley which is also mentioned in the memorable scene in the memorable movie Swingers where Jon Favreau’s friends are infinitely more impressed that their friend got a girl’s number from a different/better area code).
For me that old quote, “Don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today” is more like, “DON’T don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today.”
