Ukulele-playing taught me to enjoy bad art
In today’s society, with its emphasis on performance, it’s so easy to feel pressured to be the best. Things aren’t worth doing unless you can do them perfectly. But I call bullshit on that. Here’s how my ukulele helped me get over the pressure to be “the best” and just have fun with the things I love to do.
Killing my potential: I have a fear of success
I looked at my list of life goals and realized that most of my dreams were still just dreams. I was crestfallen and, quite frankly, furious with the world for doing this to me. I spent a few years becoming more and more frustrated with the world. One day I realized something, it wasn’t the world; it was me. It was actually all my fault. I knew from the start that it wasn’t going to be easy, but I had the talent, the passion, and I had those damn dreams. I also had something else though: fear.
Beating Impostor Syndrome
One of the fantastic commenters of Offbeat Home recently referenced “Impostor Syndrome” in a comment that Ariel then picked up on. I felt the need to share. This is a concept that has recently become a big part of life — because of these two little words, I feel I’ve come to understand how I was relating to my work a million times better, and this understanding has genuinely changed my behaviour.
10 life lessons learned from my first apartment
Attention young Offbeat Homies: At some point, you will cease to live with your parents or in a dorm room, and will very likely live in a cheap apartment, quite possibly with roommates. I hit this particular milestone my Junior year of college, and here’s what it taught me…
A year of resolutions — one for each month
I love the excuse that a new calendar provides for encouraging me to try new things, push myself, and break out of bad habits. But even though I’ve heard that it takes just three weeks to develop a new habit, my new year’s resolutions always break down around week five or six. So this year, instead of attempting a 365-day resolution, I am considering trying something different: twelve one-month challenges.
Celebrating Christmas as an Atheist
I’m a non-believer, but for me, Christmas has always been my favorite holiday for all the seasonal and festive reasons. I love the lights, the baking, the presents, the family togetherness time. Agnostic seasonal decor was a great post last year, but one of the unanswered questions, is what do you DO as a non-believer at Christmastime? If you’re curious, these are my reflections, conclusions, and current practices as an Atheist as Christmas.
How doing chores makes me feel empowered
This might seem paradoxical, and it probably is, but adding more chores to my daily life has actually given me the feeling I am more in control of my life. Some might call this backwards. Isn’t evolution supposed to drive towards a simplified life, with fewer and fewer chores?
I Miss Drugs: the domestic lives of aging hipsters
The video is part of a series from I Miss Drugs, a Twitter feed and a series of very short web videos that skewer the all-too-familiar-to-me life of the gently aging hipster. It reminds me a little bit of an update on Will Farrell’s infamous “Maybe later we’ll go to Bed Bath & Beyond” bit from Old School a decade ago… except of course they’re making jokes about Etsy and Trader Joe’s. Witness…