Idlemind - nickcoster.com
Future gazing from a quiet corner of cyberspace.

Ok, here is my first promise to myself. Every day I will write 100 words for my personal blog. I will type it in Word because it counts the words for me. I will also force myself to use good touch typing technique to improve my speed. The topic can be anything that happened that day, even if it was just a new thought. The word count won’t include the title either. That would be cheating.
I expect most of it to be total crap, but that is fine. It is not the objective to write beautiful prose. Just write.

Against my better judgment I have created a Facebook account. Sometimes I do these things just to see how they work. As I moved about the office I would see people interrupting their normal procrastinating web surfing with long visits to Facebook.

For anyone still reading this who doesn’t know what Facebook is I’ll provide a quick intro. It is an online social networking service that allows you to post up a picture of yourself and a simple profile. You then look for other people’s profiles that you know and then invite them to be friends. Simple… to begin with, but then the links form into networks. Within these networks information is shared and that is where it starts to get interesting…..

So now just watching my own Facebook profile I get a stream of the interesting, the creative, the playful, and (more often than not) the completely inane. It is strangely addictive, but already I have been linked to a couple of people that I have barely spoken to since leaving high school. And it felt good.

That seems to be part of the draw of these types of sites. It is not the silly little messages that appear all day, but the small smile that creeps onto my face when I read them and the tiny inspiration that I get when I see beauty in another’s photos. It is the micro emotional connections that they offer that somehow bring people together that I like.

The inspiration is to do it more in the offline world as well.

I just want to write something. It has been too long since i have written freely. I feel overwhelmed with everything that is going on in my life. There just seems to be no time to catch breath. We are working on something all the time. I keep thinking that maybe soon there will be a chance to catch up. But there won’t be. It is that simple.

The question that I try and deal with is what to do next and get it done. I find it hard to juggle everything, but there are no choices, just more things that need to be done.

That said it is good just to be writing this. I’ll try and add something more uplifting tomorrow.

Some people are afraid of heights or small spaces or bugs or any number of things. I am afraid of going to the dentist. I can’t even remember why. I can’t recall any particular experience that has created this fear, but i can’t recall any particularly positive ones either.

For whatever reason every time that I have been to a dentist, there has been a cavity that needs to be filled, a tooth that needs to be drilled and a needle that needs to be applied. (not necessarily in that order.)

In October, while I was overseas, I could feel a hole in one of my wisdom teeth. I knew that I couldn’t delay it any longer, but I don’t have a regular dentist. I don’t even have an irregular one. The frequency of my dental visits is almost measured in years, not months. (For accuracies sake I didn’t say decades but it wouldn’t be too much of a lie.)

Finally, over a month after my holey discovery, I defaulted to the most local dentist, just down the road. To my credit this was not a pain based decision, but I knew that pain was going to be inevitable if I didn’t do something soon.

The dental surgery was clean, new and friendly, but event the act of getting x-rays and a proper dental clean had me feeling panicky. That was the easy part.

At the end of the week the results were in….

WOW. I will be going back to the dentist for a while, but it was time to start with something. The bastard tooth that started it all. The recommendation was to pull it out and it’s buddy on the other side. My last dentist has said the same, but is never went back. Fear. It was easier to run.

On Tuesday this week it was time to stop running. I stepped up to the surgery again to have the offending teeth removed. It went well. There was NO pain. I couldn’t believe it. I practically sobbed when it was over, so great was the relief.

It is a testament to the power of fear. What else can I handle that fear had stopped me from taking on?

The secret to writing every day…

….is to write every day.