I need a challenge. An adventure. Something to test my mettle. Not just this. Not just SnappedShots. SnappedShots is an exercise in nothing more than a sort of single-minded, lethargic perseverance. It is water torture. A drop. Another. Another. How much can I stand? I’m not close to giving up. Not nearly. And it’s not only torture. It’s something that I love to do. I love the challenge. I love the process. I love the discipline. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m a captive of my slow project. It crawls like tectonic shifting, imperceptible. The goldfish principle: Goldfish can grow quite huge but they grow in proportion to their bowl, their pond, their environment, their space. My space is too small. All my walls have moved in. I’m Sisyphus always halfway up the mountain. Will I tremble, stumble, drop the rock? Will I make it up at last and over? It never really matters. Because I’m always precisely halfway up the mountain. There’s got to be a math word for that. Or a Stephen Hawking concept of the universe. Two points, secured, anchored, tethered, and the parabola, the line in the middle stretches, doubles, redoubles, stretches out infinitely. That’s me. Halfway up that mountain. Always.

I need a new challenge. Something else. Something finite and measurable. So I know when I’m done. So I know that I’ve either dropped the rock or beaten the mountain. It could be anything. A piano recital. The longest sustained jumping jacks. Eating the most slugs at one sitting. Selling toothpaste. Applying for the most jobs in a day. Being a concierge for a day. A pilot for a day. Learning fluent Mandarin. Learning Drafting with AutoCad from EducationDirect. No, I’m not suffering a Guinness Book mentality. Not exactly. I just need something finite. I need an accomplishment. I need to be evaluated. Like Lisa Simpson during a teacher strike: Grade me, evaluate me, won’t somebody puh-lease grade me, she begs like junkie.

I need successes. And failures too, I suppose. Small checkpoints in life. Where I’m graded, where I’ve finished something. But it isn’t like that. Perhaps it’s never like that for anybody. Reality shows make it look like that, though. Another week, another challenge, another council, another and another until the prize, the golden ring, the money, the boy, the girl, the job. Whatever. Hercules had twelve trials. One by one by one until he was done. No, I suppose, life isn’t structured like Greek myths, or even like reality TV shows.

There are no checkpoints in my life. No photo-opportunity signs. No parties, no celebrations, no congratulations, no kudos.

Like I said, I need to find a finite measurable task, something that will challenge me; something at which I can either fail or succeed but I will know that I had tried my best and that, whichever way it goes, I have finished.

In the end, perhaps I’m smart enough to know that we all measure ourselves. But I’m not doing that very well right now.

SS

“People who are crazy blow up buildings, or kill people, or don’t pay their taxes.”

- Stacie J., The Apprentice