My Greatest Weekness

It has been an interesting and exciting week, and we’re very blessed to have had it.

After thirteen months of toil, strife, and a mess of holidays without pay, I finally got my start date! Yes, you read that correctly. It took thirteen months, but I am now officially a state employee, complete with medical, retirement, paid sick and vacation, and paid holidays! What a year!

Tuesday was our two-year anniversary, and we celebrated it in style—okay, so we actually just hung out at home and ordered a pizza, but you know. Does it help that the pizza wasn’t on our new healthy lifestyle eating plan? Either way, it was delicious!

On Wednesday, we stayed home from work to celebrate a Hawaiian state holiday. Held in honor of the great King Kamehameha, this holiday nevertheless takes on the solemnity of your average Memorial Day or Labor Day on the mainland: a few people here are super-excited about it, and the rest see it as a free day off. All my love to Hawaii and its people, but I have to say: I just loved the fact that for the first time in my life, I got me a paid holiday!

Just in case you’re curious, we also have Prince Kuhio Day in March, and Statehood Day in August—two holidays which you working stiffs don’t have, but which we state employees in our cushy state jobs can’t seem to get enough of.

I’m finding that this really is difficult. How on Earth do you make a week sound interesting?

Hmmmmm …

We are having a fried rice contest at work tomorrow. Thirteen different people (Randi among them) have signed up for a shot at twenty bucks, and possibly some admiration from their fellow co-workers—at least those co-workers who get a chance to sample the fried rice before it runs out.

I think it will be an interesting contest, especially given the fact that fried rice takes on the air of your traditional mainland casserole: if you found it in your fridge, and it’s still good, throw it in the wok. I’m sure we’re bound to see spam in profusion, and I know at least one person is planning to add kamaboko—a sort of processed “fish cake” made from the leftover bits of white fish that didn’t make it into fish sticks. Yes, there is a spam for fish!

Just to give you an example: one student is planning to add kamaboko, bacon, Portuguese sausage, scrambled eggs, pork butt (which is actually pork shoulder), green onions, and Hawaiian chili peppers.

We will definitely keep everyone posted on how the contest goes, though we’re not holding our breath. These people have hundreds of years of combined experience in fried rice preparation.

It occurs to me as I think up what else to put into this post that I never told the garlic fries story I promised. It took place a very long time ago, so I hope I have the details right, but a commitment is a commitment.

Some months back, we ordered dinner from a place called the Dixie Grill, hoping for a spot of good barbecue. We realize now that mainland barbecue is quite a different thing from Hawaiian barbecue, but at the time …

As one of our side dishes, Randi and I each ordered a serving of garlic fries, thinking that in the style of Old Chicagos everywhere, we would be treated to a heap of the golden-brown delicacies sprinkled with a measure of garlic salt. (also, we were really craving Lazlo’s at the time)

What we received instead was a heap of soggy French fries liberally coated in raw, minced garlic—the real stuff, not processed. In fact, the garlic was so prevalent that when I pulled the French fries out of my to-go container, scraped all the garlic off, and packed the garlic into a measuring cup, I was able to collect about half a cup of fresh garlic. Can we say overkill?

That’s really about all for this week, or at least the portion of the week that has taken place thus far. I will write more when more happens, or when next Thursday rolls around, whichever comes first.

Thanks for reading (possibly), and I promise the next post won’t be quite so centered around food.

Composition time: 30 minutes

A Solemn Reflection, and and an Attempted Resolution

When I was growing up, I aspired to become a writer. This aspiration persisted even into high school and beyond, where most of one’s dreams usually die out in favor of practicality. However, I kept at it as a hobby, believing that if I worked hard enough at it, I could some day make a success of the profession.

However, I found out later that my being a writer required something—well, two things—of me that I found it incredibly hard to give: persistence, and the ability to write and write and write and write, and then go back and edit later. My general lean toward new experiences took care of the first, and my perfectionism took care of the second.

The second is easier to remedy: I just have to force myself to keep going no matter what; I have to force everything out until I can’t write anymore, then go back and look at it later. That way, it might not take me an hour to write a well constructed blog post—yes, some of those previous gems on the website took over an hour to write, and they’re not very long.

The former issue, though, is the one which has killed nearly every major effort I have undertaken, including some rather important projects and life choices

I am incensed—even captivated—by new and interesting experiences. I latch onto new ideas and concepts with reckless abandon, and I explore every depth and facet of them … for about three weeks. Then I get bored and move on to something else, and the old hobby, along with its equipment or expectations, goes by the wayside

Keep writing, Ryan. Don’t stop to edit until you’re finished.

This is not a bad thing if your hobby is something like politics, where people don’t really care if you’re a guru or not—and in fact, being a guru can even get pretty annoying sometimes. (I have reason to know, as I used to be enthralled by the issues that came up at Hudson Bay. Sorry Randi.) However, when I drop $300 on Sound Forge so that I can record books, but get bored of recording books after the third chapter of my first one; when I decide to go out and buy a nice slow cooker so I can make many delicious hot meals while at work; when I spend an undisclosed amount of money on a gym membership, but tire of going after only a few weeks because the adventure has gone out of it; when I promise people I’ll update the blog on a consistent basis, but cease to update it once I start spending an hour on a simple post, I realize after some reflection that I have a real problem.

I want to be a better cook, learn more advanced guitar skills, try my hand at beer making, write a book, build something myself, learn home repairs, lose weight, and any one of a number of other things, but unless I can learn to start completing things I begin, I’ll never make headway once the going gets rougher.

You’ll be pleased to know I at least abstained from buying the slow cooker, which turned out to be a good thing, as the slow cooking phase lasted about a week. You might also like to know that I’m still going to the gym, though I don’t want to as much as I did before. Tough. I’ll keep at it.

I must not reread this yet. I must not reread this yet! I WILL NOT REREAD THIS YET!

I realize I have a problem. I understand that I need to learn to stick to a thing for longer than a few weeks, because I know that if I can get past the perceived tedium of a thing, I can discover the joy in it—and who knows? I might even be able to finish something I start.

I would not be surprised in the least if nobody is reading this blog anymore. After all, you’ve been promised and promised, but have only received a scant few updates, and the last of these was over six months ago. If you are still reading this, thank you. Thank you for believing in our ability to stick to a thing even when our track record is so shotty. If you’re not still reading our blog, I don’t blame you, and further, I don’t know why I’m even writing to you; you’re not reading it in the first place.

So here’s the point—the whole reason I’ve rambled so much: I understand that I need consistency. I understand that I need progress. I understand that I need to work to overcome this major fault of mine. Some day, I would like to accomplish so much more—both in my career and personal life—and I need this self-diagnosed therapy to do it.

So this is my therapy—this blog, among other things. I have set myself a reminder, and I have told myself that I will write an update once a week, and I will not sleep until the writing is accomplished. If there are any of you out there who are still with me in this venture, welcome and enjoy. If I’m talking to myself, and my words are lost somewhere in deep web, at least I’m doing it, and growing as a result.

Here goes … something.