A New Year’s Resolution for the Arrogant

December 30, 2008 · Posted in General · Comment 

I have (among many) one bad habit that takes up much of my time. I am an admitted Wiki-holic, and, in my regular fix of Wiki-Crack (thanks, Zac — love that term), I peruse the lists of births and deaths for a given day.

I hate to admit it, but it depresses the hell out of me, and not so much the “deaths” section.  It’s the births section that really gets to me.  You may think that moderately strange, but let me explain.

If you haven’t already figured it out, I am rather narcissistic.  I have a web site that uses my name as it’s domain name, and it’s dedicated to everything me.  I know, others do it as well; even after a couple of months, though, I have a difficult time not feeling arrogant every time I tell someone about it or about the contents.

There’s a flip side to this narcissism and arrogance, though, and it’s one of the things that has driven me (literally) crazy over the years.  I’m extremely hard on myself most of the time, because I don’t feel I’ve earned the right to be arrogant.

I’m intelligent?  Big deal, you’re no smarter than a lot of people.  I’ve written a couple of novels?  Yeah, I think there’s a few other novelists out there.  I write music?  Big deal; look on MySpace’s bands section and see how many other people write music.

I don’t have anything to really show for what I’ve accomplished — no awards, no real media exposure.  I don’t have a publisher, and I haven’t heard a public performance of any of my music in almost a decade (and even that was my own performance — it’s not like I could sit back and enjoy listening to it).

Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t a whining post (I’ll probably do one of those in a week or two).  This is a post about my “professional” new years resolution.  I have a few private ones (and no, quitting smoking is not on that list.  Sorry — maybe next year, but don’t bet the farm on it), but this is the one I’m making a public record of, so it can come back and bite me in the ass next December.

I resolve that, within the course of 2009, I will do something of enough notability that I will be “wiki-worthy”.  My goal is that, by 2010, I’ll have a page on Wikipedia that talks about my music, writing, or whatever I’m doing at the time.

I am going to qualify it with this: it will be a good accomplishment that gets me there.  Not murder, not some other criminal act.  Not suicide, nor being in a porn film (although if I weren’t married …. nah…)

It will be through either writing fiction or writing music, at least that I can foresee now, but I’ll be in there dammit.

Trust me, I’ve thought about just going in there, adding it myself, and seeing how long it stays up there.  That seems a bit too much like cheating though, and defeats the purpose.

Okay, so that’s out of the way.  The betting pools are now open as to how long it is before I give up on this.  Vegas is setting the odds of me giving up in less than a month at just over 1.5:1; I’m still waiting on the line for the 2-6 month period…

Catch you on the flip side ;)

–Matt

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