I need to grow up.

I’ve been implementing the “Getting Things Done” productivity system. It’s helped me in some ways, but I’m still not very productive in the evenings. I may accomplish one or two little tasks—cleaning the bathrooms, writing a bit—but that seems marginal considering that I have a good two or three hours per night to do things.

I’m sure that this is at least partly due to maturity. I get home, and I relax for awhile, and then my inner ten-year-old whines, “I don’t wanna do anything except lay here on the couch and surf the web!” To some extent, I realize the importance of recognizing that as a legitimate physical response. If I feel tired, maybe that’s because I’m tired.

On the other hand, often I do have the energy to do things; I just can’t bring myself to do them. I’m not physically tired; I just can’t get up the gumption to do much of anything.

Which raises an interesting question: How can I grow myself up?

I’m willing to train myself to be more mature. But how do I do that?

On further thought—and I can tell this is going to be an update that wanders without any satisfactory shape—I wonder if I just don’t want to make a choice. I do dislike making choices. Taking the road less traveled means that I can’t experience the more-traveled one. Sometimes, I can hear the voice in the back of my mind whispering, “If you just put this off a little while, you may be able to make a better decision later!”

But of course, that’s almost never true. Time gives us experience, yes, but it also gives us greater complexity. I may be more informed tomorrow…but I’ll also have more to do (because something else will need to be done then).

I don’t fear failure. I fear that success will keep me from experiences other than that particular success.

Or maybe I have a completely different issue, and I’m barking up the wrong tree.

(Speaking of trees, the photo that accompanies this entry shows a tree near work. It looked interesting to me, a stark, bare tree against the rolling grey clouds. Very atmospheric.)

I just got my art gallery back online; it’s been non-functional for awhile. The site is still very basic, but you can at least browse my poor attempts at art.

Didn’t get much sleep last night—about six hours, and I never do well on less than eight—so I’ve been a little spacy all day. Awake, but unable to really concentrate on anything.

Fortunately, I was able to complete a few things at work, and had dinner at my parents’ followed by a showing of Shanghai Knights, which I think is one of Jackie Chan’s better movies, and certainly one of the best of his later work.

The photo on the right shows a sausage and mushroom pizza I made on Saturday. It’s a ”white” pizza, meaning that there’s no tomato sauce. It’s just a Boboli crust topped with cheese, hot Italian sausage pieces, onion, and mushroom slices (with sprinkles of rosemary and hot pepper flakes), baked for twenty-five minutes, then topped again with cheese just after it’s removed from the oven. That’s it. Easy, inexpensive, and delicious. Spicy, too; you’ll want a glass of something cold to go with it.

Spotted this last week, growing next to my front walkway:

I planted that flower myself, last fall.

Now I’m going to admit something that will probably alienate all fifteen of my readers: I really like to garden. Oddly, I don’t have the reasons that I typically read about; I don’t love the feel of soil in my hands. Soil’s dirty. It’s essentially dry mud.

But I do love beautifying a space. I can take a butt-ugly landscape and make it pretty, a place where people actually want to spend their tiime. Very rarely do we get a chance to consciously make something look good.

It reminds me of a sermon I heard once, in which the speaker suggested that humans have essentially two great callings: To make things beautiful, and to keep things beautiful. Creation and maintenance.

I think he was right.

And no, I don’t have a strong ending for this entry. That’s it.

I tried something new tonight: I gave myself a couple of hours to goof off after I got home, expecting to get some things accomplished afterwards. I hoped that the rest would recharge me with enough energy to get me through a few hours’ worth of personal duties. It worked: I had no problems cleaning, paying bills, and finishing this week’s updates to Matrix Experiments Lain. Excellent!

I goofed off by watching Godzilla’s Revenge, a truly awful Godzilla movie about a whiny kid who dreams he can travel to Monster Island and see Godzilla and company duke it out. So half of the movie contains decent Godzilla fights, while the other half follows this kid around his mundane life in Tokyo, being picked on by a local gang of older kids and acting morose because his parents work so much. Of course, there’s a Big Adventure: a couple of incompetent bank robbers kidnap him, and he has to escape. He uses a few of the tricks he learned from his dreams to outwit and outfight the crooks and run to safety.

But the really intriguing thing about the film is the end. The boy is shown going back to school the next day, and on the way he’s surrounded by the gang (who previously dared him to honk the horn on a bike belonging to a painter nearby). Our hero promptly rams the leader of the gang and fights him, finally winning the fight. The hero then runs over to the same bike and honks the horn, causing the painter to fall over in surprise and get paint all over himself. The hero then runs off, where he’s joined by the cheering gang of kids, and they all run off into the sunset.

I blinked. The heck kind of ending is that, where the hero ends up essentially joining a street gang?

But after thinking about it for awhile, I realized that the kid had triumphed by finding a way to be part of the larger social group. He was no longer an individual outcast; now he belonged to a group. It fits perfectly with Japanese ideals of conformity to a larger social structure.

Obviously, I don’t want to read too much into an overtly silly Godzilla movie. But I can’t think of any other way to understand the ethics of that ending.

In other news, I’ve put together another audioblog anime review. The one comment I received about my previous review lamented at being unfamiliar with the series being reviewed. So, this time, I’m reviewing the first disc in the series: Gantz volume 1. I’m actually rather proud of this review; I’m not as hesitant as I was in the previous review. It helped that I had a list of questions on the screen, which I was answering as I spoke.

As before, let me know what you think.