Saturday, April 21, 2018
You never really know what you'll get
The month of March passed here on clerkmanifesto and with it passed the five year anniversary of this blog. Five years! Five years of daily blog posts. I meant to note it but I was too busy blogging. Fortunately I have been able to take a moment out now, belatedly, from my busy blogging schedule, in order to stop blogging and properly celebrate here this auspicious occasion.
I am? Really? Blogging right now?
Oh boy! You're right! Look at my little typing fingers go!
Well, there in itself is a lesson for everyone. Blog every single day for five years and your typing speed goes from a modest 41 words a minute to a blazing 44 words a minute.
Once, shortly before the start of this blog, in the late 1980's, there was a popular book called Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. My friends and I mocked it because, though we wished it was true, we were suspicious that it didn't apply to the likes of us. Confidently suspicious. Around this time a phrase from a movie "If you build it they will come" was also popular. A trifling 25 or so years later these phrases were shifting around optimistically in my mind as I began the profoundly dedicated undertaking that you see playing out here before your eyes. In my wildest dreams though I never imagined they would come true the way they did here, primarily concerning typing speed, with "A Slightly Faster Typing Speed" standing in for "the Money" (Do What You Love and A Slightly Faster Typing Speed Will Follow) and "a slightly faster typing speed" standing in for "they" ("If you build it a slightly faster typing speed will come").
I'm not complaining, exactly, with the added bonus that I can do it a little bit faster than I used to.
4 comments:
If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.
I respond to pretty much every comment. It's like a free personalized blog post!
One last detail: If you are commenting on a post more than two weeks old I have to go in and approve it. It's sort of a spam protection device. Also, rarely, a comment will go to spam on its own. Give either of those a day or two and your comment will show up on the blog.
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Congratulations! That's quite an accomplishment (tho I think you get so much pleasure from the blog that to call it an "accomplishment" implies that it's something you have to sometimes force yourself to power through)! Here's to ten more years! And faster typing! And a Pulitzer!
ReplyDeleteThe other one of those things you're taking about is to "follow your bliss," which seems to me to be very good advice, as long as there's nothing afterwards that says: "follow your bliss and you will never work a day in your life." There are other platitudes like that that I think are valuable in one sense, like, "don't ever give up," or to have perseverance in general terms, but they're often couched in terms that somehow there's a magic button the universe will make you rich and successful because you didn't give up. It's a little sickening because what it implies is that if you're not "successful" you just by gosh haven't followed your bliss or persevered hard enough or maybe you've given up on your dreams.
Well, I know what you mean, but there is a very real way it's work (and I think you know this). It's complicated, and the long discussion I had just now in my brain, involving me and Kazuo Ishiguro and what is work and what isn't was probably not going to flatter me, nor will the following explanation, but I will present this one anyway:
DeleteJust because Shakespeare had a really engaging and likely satisfying time writing Hamlet doesn't mean he didn't accomplish something notable by writing it.
Although sadly he had no typewriter.
I find your second paragraph here right on point! And yes, I think Joseph Campbell was the smart and wise original that was twisted into a kind of particularly irritating 80's theology and Capitalist apologia.
Why just this morning i thought about how utterly corrupted the internet is and that how Clerkmanifesto© is really the only genuine quality emanating from my phone. It brought to my mind that Blanche Dubois line, she's realizing that she has washed up in squalor and endangerment. To paraphrase... "The cathedral bells, they are the only truly pure things in the French Quarter."
ReplyDeleteI'm the cathedral bells! I'm the cathedral bells!
DeleteThanks.
(And look at that, I am also now copyrighted!)