Wednesday, July 11, 2007

We adjourned yesterday without a single mention of downloadable media, a travesty that requires immediate remedy. If you’re craving a 25-hour role-playing epic, flush with terrible dialogue and menus and unicorns and peregrine falcons, you’ll want to look elsewhere. But if you’re like me, afflicted with a recent inability to sit still for more than 20 minutes, this is your ticket. What this entertainment lacks in difficulty, it compensates with charm.

Self-betterment plans are seemingly designed to explode as soon as they’re hatched, with a timer wired to go off in but a few days. The key to extending the shelf life and making any meaningful progress, at least for me, is to package the plan around a very human tendency: the need to gather stuff, to amass things. The difference here, though, is the commodity isn’t tangible, and in place of money, or movies, or delicious raspberry candies is mental capital. Skills. Knowledge.

A guitar session might involve collecting another chord or, perhaps in the following lesson, I’ll try to find a good strumming pattern. An afternoon of tennis could be spent on regaining a serve. Maybe the goal for next month will be to reacquire some violin basics, driven by inspiration from one of the greats. Remember when this happened? Well, I won’t have to reacquire the violin itself. 1-0, Yo-Yo.