Motivation YEAH!
Motivation. Now this is something that i very often take for granted. But everynow and then i tend to lack a little of this, such as when i had the flu a few weeks ago, and even more recently when i felt a bit daunted at the piling up of assignments that i have infront of me to do. And it is at moments like these that i reaslise how much motivation i have and simply take for granted. Now I’m not saying that i’m the most motivated kernal on the cob because i’m certainly not. I am not the sort of person that would wake up at five in the morning just to walk around the streets looking for stray dogs that i could then find homes for, that is just not the sort of thing i would want to do. But I do want to do alrightish at Uni, and i do want to get a job in the sort of profession that i’m keen on and i do want to meet new and interesting people, and i do have the motivation to do all of these things. Yet everynow and then I teter on the cusp of not caring about it all and it is moments like these that are actually pretty valuable in assessing what you already have. Not having motivation would hold you back more than not having a limb, or having a disease or only owning one pair of underpants that was two sizes too small…
Why am i writing this?
A wise friend recently told me that a blog is like a puppy, you can’t just get one play with it for a bit and then abandon it. This is how i feel in regards to this blog. For over two weeks now it has sat idle and lonely and i must shoulder the fact that i have indeed neglected it. So from now on i will try and write in it at least twice a week. All very well then, but why? What good comes from writing a blog? Is it just to tell people more about myself in an egotistical fashion? Where do i get value from it? Where do others? Hmmm.
For me part of the value of a blog is in bettering my writing skills with the hope of increasing my employment prospects. Recently over a coffee i discovered that a bilingual classmate of mine also has a couple of blogs that she tends too. Upon questioning she reluctantly admitted that they were trashy fashion blogs and that she actually spent a fair amount of time making them look professional, as she wants to get into fashion journalism. What a brilliant idea! She is already getting a foot in the door by publishing content in the area that she hopes to work in, surely this can only greater her chances of getting a dream job.
But this blog isn’t really all that work orientated, unless i plan on writing for a magazine that specialises in what a twenty year old University student named Justin is thinking about (hmmm would that work??). So there is something else that this blog does, something more personal. Have you ever kept a diary? I did from year nine to year ten. I wrote in it every couple of days, and it makes for intreiging reading now. I notice all of the dumb things that i have done or said, and how i have changed since. In some ways it has helped me not to judge other people that say mean, or silly things, because i have self documented proof that i have done similar. It really keeps you grounded.
But why write it on the web for all to see instead of just writing it in Word and saving it under the file name ‘dumb stuff that i just did’? Because it provides an informal, passive way to keep in touch with people, letting them know if not what i’m actually up to, then what I am thinking. And it is rarely a bad thing to know what other people are thinking.
So if this blog fulfils either of the three aforementioned purposes, then it will be much better than a kick in the pants and will be well worth writing in every couple of days.
I’ve got an idea!
I have a wad load of ideas running through my head at the moment, and it is awesome. Ideas are what get me fired up, get me doing things – not necesarily productive or useful things, but things nevertheless. And when you are doing things you feel busy, and being busy means that you just don’t have time to think about how trivial the things that you are doing are. Although i’m sure that i do have good productive ideas, and i would apply myself to them thouraghly, it’s just at the moment they err well towards the ‘if i didn’t actually think this up and put it in motion nobody would really mind’ sort of ideas.
My latest idea is to write a version of the song ‘I’ll kill her’ by Soko from an Australian male’s point of view instead of a French ladies. This then led me onto recording it with my mate Jason who lives in the Gold Coast, so travel plans are on the cards. But travelling there would be so much cooler if i was with my mate Phil who i am visting this Friday in Armidale and hopefully while i’m there i’ll swing by Charlotte’s place and hopefully my Cousins. But before i travel to Armidale i would very much like to have my new shiny speakers installed in my car, but Hay’s Boyfriend Phil is busy and i don’t have tools to put them in, so perhaps i can borrow some off someone else, or make some (would a knife work as a saw and a screwdriver?) and then if i could download some talking books from the network that would really make the journey fly.
It’s odd that just yesterday i was actually getting a little bored with Uni life and i didn’t have any ideas that figeratively roasted my potatoes, but now i am overcome with them. I guess that just goes to show that ideas can be fleeting and flippant and that when you get one in your sight you should really make an effort to squeeze all of the creative juice out of it before it slips back through your fingers.
what April fools means
Here on campus for April fools day a prank competition is being run, so I thought I would get in the spirit of things and pull a smallish prank on my German house mate Steffan. I thought I’d steal his keys while he was in the shower, lock him out of his room, and then get him to tropes across campus in search of his keys – funny stuff. In all fairness, I felt pretty confident, so I told him that I had him lined up for a prank and that he should be wary. But in reality it was I that should have been more aware. At three in the morning on the first of April I was woken by an alarm clock that had been hidden in my room, and I couldn’t find it because the lights didn’t work, curtesy of Steffen flicking the fuse. Then at seven o’clock when I was getting breakfast, I opened my food cupboard and mountains of packing foam tumbled out. But the real icing on the cake was when I saw that my car had been wrapped up in 400m of industrial cling wrap. Steffen three, Justin nil. Now the odd thing that I realised while I was slowly unwrapping my car, a process that took about twenty minutes, was that I really didn’t mind it at all, in fact I was quite proud that someone had spent such a great deal of time and effort in pulling a prank on me. The prank meant more to me as a show of friendship than a set back to my day. So I guess the point of this is that meaning can manifest itself in many different forms. Hopefully then, when Steffen opens his door tomorrow and faces a wall of packing foam he too will interpret this as a sign of friendship and not a sinister shot at revenge.
