posting old drafts

[this is a rather old post that I noticed was never published, just saved in draft form. It's probably a year or two old. I'm trying to post them now. I don't really know why, perhaps the same selective anal retentiveness that makes me occasionally delete the old messages from my email inbox. perhaps I'm just looking for an excuse to avoid the quiet dark awareness of lying in bed not sleeping]

You know, I used to love shopping for gadgets and such, but now I hate it. I hate shopping. It's a f*&king wast of time and it gives me a headache and it feels futile. I guess the difference is I used to like shopping because I would have fantasies about how the stuff I was going to get would change my life. But it never did. It just sat there, looking at me with those doleful hound-dog eyes. Buying a camera will not make you a photographer, it will not make you start taking pictures more often, buying a drawing pad will not make you start drawing more, buying and instrument will not make you practice.

Which is why, nowadays, I much more prefer buying lessons. Because that will make you draw more, play more, practice more. However, that's still a step removed from where I'd like to be, which is doing these things, which I want to do, without having to pay someone to make me do them. It's still useful to be taught how to do these things, often, but to have a baby sitter... well, it's fine, except it ends up costing a lot, and you don't get as good results as you would if you were just well self-motivated. This is what I want to shop for, now-a-days.

But as with most genuinely useful things, you can't actually buy these. There is no shortcut. Which is fine. What's not fine is I can't even seem to find the long-cut. I can't seem to find any way at all to acquire these qualities. Perhaps because I don't really care about them, because, as I said earlier, I don't think anything in this world will be able to give me lasting happiness. Or meaning. Even a sterling character. Not that I can see any way to know for sure, since I haven't found a way to get a sterling character, yet. The problem is motivation: I'm not going to keep doing something if it's not worth my while to do it. When I put in the extra effort required to do what I think I should, it's never the fulfillment I was hoping for, so I'm disappointed. Or, I just flat out fail and feel awful about that. Or, it proves to be something that requires a lot of work, and I get tired/bored, and give up, eventually, when it turns out all the work necessary is really, really not fun.

This is all in my mind. Sometimes, I enjoy the process itself. It's just a matter of... how I think about it. If I'm doing it, trying to get some result, and that's why I'm doing it, I can't do it: all I end up with is disappointment, failure, boredom. Whereas things I enjoy doing, are great, until I realize those things are things I think I should be doing, and then I congratulate myself on doing what I'm supposed to, and then it becomes work, and I have to do it, and I start failing to achieve what I'm supposed to achieve, and I feel bad again, and there's no point in doing it any more, because it just brings me misery: reminding myself how I haven't been doing it and I should be doing it, or how I'm not improving enough to be what I think I should be.

Fucking shit, it sucks.