Halfway There - May, June, and Half of July
Let's pivot.
I've been hesitant to give updates because I've been feeling it difficult to articulate how I feel about this challenge, at the halfway point, and because I've just done so many things, and there's a scheduling friction between writing about fifty things I've already done while trying to complete 150 more things. Past and future rarely harmonize. Here's the full list of achievements from the last 2.5 months.
Go to a Powwow. Volunteer for the homeless. Do a geocache. Axe-throwing: here's an actual story worth telling: halfway through my axe-throwing session, they asked me if I wanted to switch from the axe to the tomahawk, and immediately I began shooting bullseyes. “The wand picks the wizard,” someone said when I told them this story. How many early failures, how many quick and tidy give-ups, might have been remedied with some minor adjustment? Have an ant farm: only five survived shipping, huge letdown! Build a self-sustaining terrarium. Get to 100 top 3 victories in Duolingo Diamond League: a few related language goals below will show the value of targeting meaningless things like league wins when working on a language; the point of gamification is to abstract away from outcomes and to instead turn input time into an outcome in itself, thus boosting input time. Learn lockpicking. Get a Pokemon Showdown ELO of 1600: playing competitive Pokemon was a childhood dream: ELO of 1600 is like the median player, and that's all I wanted and expected. Use the library 20 times. Take a dance class: line-dancing at Desert 5 Spot. Hike to the Hollywood Sign. Keep house plants: I made a kokedama. Go to 10 mixers. Finish the AFI Top 100… Ten Years Later list: a list of old movies I had started before going to film school. Great list! I would recommend Nashville off of it, which I think about most days. It’s a striking film: it’s three hours long and follows twenty-five vivid characters. There are many movies that we call ensemble films, but they really aren’t, and Nashville exists as countervailing evidence to such claims. Most of May, to be frank, was watching old movies. Donate blood. Make a polished orb: this is a Japanese hobby where you pound aluminum foil into a perfect orb, and after doing a few orbs I started pounding skulls, which brings me to something I will show off later in this update. See a movie at Hollywood Forever: that evening, right as The Big Lebowski ended, I saw a shooting star and felt so lucky. Watch 100 movies. Cook a dish from every continent: koshary, seitan buns, raspberry jam, escabeche, arepa, kaima bona gatoi. Join the bone marrow registry. Memorize pi to 50 digits. Listen to 50 albums and record my thoughts: yeah, this goal originally was for 100 albums but I found it so tedious. Music exists solely so that we can play Dance Dance Revolution. You learn by doing as much as by not doing. Learn Morse Code: there's an adorable little app for this. Memorize a poem: I met a traveler from an antique land who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, half-sunk a shattered visage lies.” Finish the AFI Top 100 list: the original list on which the 10th anniversary is based. See The Great Wall of LA. Learn screenprinting. Fold an origami crane. Learn a 10th language and read a book in Swedish: I read this 19th century play called Miss Julie, which I found much easier to read than Pippi Longstocking, the first Swedish book I attempted, because Duolingo does not teach the words for gold nuggets or for piracy. Go to 50 art galleries. Take a celebrity mansion tour. Win a claw machine: this became my new obsession; I now have 84 new little plush friends in my home, and I’ve only been doing this for a month and change. Learn braille. Read a book in Norwegian: A Doll's House by Ibsen. Volunteer for the environment: I helped out with compost collection. Do a graffiti. Make a neon sign. Read a book in Italian: Six Characters in Search of an Author. Donate to a nonprofit: the meditation app I used was having a matching donation drive so I sent them one hundred dollars. Dance a 7 on Dance Dance Revolution: yeah I danced a 7 in late June, which by 7 I mean the difficulty level of the dance, which was meaningful since when I started I could barely muster a 4… And then I really got the DDR bug so now I’ve danced a 7 in doubles, the significantly tougher format where you dance on both dance pads at once. Participate in a medical study. Learn an 11th language and read a book in Danish: I read the very funny Erasmus Montanus, an 18th century play about a college student who comes home to his podunk town with strange ideas, like the earth being round. Exhibit my visual art: at a show for my neon workshop. Do karaoke. Read a book in Dutch: The Freeloader, a novella about a bohemian. See a movie at the New Beverly: I saw Repo Man at Quentin Tarantino's theater. Learn a 12th language and read a book in Catalan: The Apothecary of Malgrat, a comic play. Use a 3D printer. Improve my visual art. Perform in 15 improv shows. Make a collage. Learn decoupage: check the skull in the photo reel.
As far as how I feel about all of this, well, there's probably a long version and a short version of this. I think the short version looks something like this: when I started this challenge, I would jokingly, and only to myself because the grandiosity of this statement reeks, say I was trying to do more in a year than most people do in a lifetime. The comedic impulse relies on structuring and exploring absurdity, both what makes the absurdity absurd and what kernel of realism exists therein, and my list of goals reflects some serious thinking about what it would look like to try to do more in a year than most people do in a lifetime. By my reckoning, you probably want to do something like this: you must pursue at least one goal of the utmost ambition, that few attempt and few succeed at. If you've read the above, you might recognize that what I'm trying to do is read books in as many languages as possible. Right now, I have read books in eleven languages. I am also doing drills to try and knock out a Romanian book and a German book by the end of summer. Of these languages, I had only read books in four of them prior to this year, and for three of them I had not even gotten to the point where I could read a Wikipedia page: Esperanto, Danish, and Catalan were all languages in which I would claim no aptitude prior to this year. Obviously, I relied on the mutual intelligibilities of the Romance languages and the Nordic languages, which aid greatly in this challenge, and I have proudly used a dictionary throughout since part of reading a book in a foreign language is the gift of expanding one’s vocabulary, but even with all of that I think it'd be overly generous to say that what, 50,000 people have read books in eleven languages? Eleven is just a very large number. Romanian and German seem like done deals to me, and if I really dedicate myself to it I think there's a chance I can fit two more languages in; I'm eyeing a few; 15 languages by EOY seems doable. Indonesian, Arabic, Galician maybe. And so that's the centerpiece of the challenge: doing one hyper-rare task, something hardly attempted over the course of a lifetime.
After that, there are three more categories you should target: bucket-list items, oddities that most people would think are cool and unique but which most people don’t actively pursue in a lifetime, and the various interstitial items that most people do, or consider doing, at some point, of which you should target a great volume. Bucket-list items I have completed include, well, reading a book in a foreign language is one of them for sure, but so is exhibiting one's art, and I'm targeting trying to visit every continent this year and I’m halfway through writing a novel. The oddities include making a neon sign, dancing DDR and rocking the claw machine, and a few future items on my agenda include taking a puppetry class and making a taxidermy. I’m also halfway through a sewing class. As for the interstitials, these range from taking a dance class to learning morse code, donating to a non-profit, to standing barefoot in the rain to using a 3d printer to axe-throwing.
This is to say that… Yes, I’m doing it. Let me turn for a moment to my goal setting philosophy. In previous years, I always targeted completing 70%-80% of my goals. At 300 goals, that’s 210-240. Right now I sit at the halfway point. On July 4th, if you include partially completed tasks like my sewing class and finishing that novel, I was probably at 120, and if you only consider the ones I had actually completed, it’s more like 109. Double that and you get to 220-240, so I’m exactly in the range for what I want. There is, at this point, a self-enforcing energy in my ambition. By shooting so big I have lived bigger, so the act of targeting these goals is itself transformational. One cannot live more in a year than a lifetime, but that’s maybe the aforementioned kernel of realism: that if we pooh-pooh such goals we mistake the purpose of aspirations, and only by aspiring to something so comically large can we understand this fact about goals and dreams.
As for the long version of what I think about things, well, I think I will have to complete the challenge to know how I felt at the halfway point, and I imagine I will need some lag time thereafter to know how I felt about my year at the full year mark. I feel at once transformed, because when you do this much it has to change you, but also I feel that at some level this is just me becoming who I always had been. It's true of anything transformational, right: if you transform, you were always the sort of person who could transform, and so there can't be that big a delta between who you were and who you are. The only change, actually, is that at one point you lived up to your potential and at one point your potential still lurked before you unlived.
Roll the photo reel:
