prpl.net

If you could spend your time doing anything, what would it be? The stress of school/research got me thinking about what life would be like if I could afford, in both time and money, to be a total slacker with a life of leisure. I’ve come to the conclusion that if ever given such an opportunity I would probably pursue several new hobbies every week with breathtaking zeal. Most of them would be forgotten just as quickly.

I’ve always been interested by the strangest things, and once I’m curious about something I latch onto the idea until I get a chance to try it. Then, once I’ve tried said thing out and the newness wears off, I typically lose interest. It’s only ever been a few things that really stayed with me as true loves for long periods of time (like piano).

I think what gets me fired up about new hobbies is learning how to do something. I love the satisfaction of creating things or making something work. A few years ago I was inspired to build a dynamic website from scratch. I taught myself PHP, MySQL and stylesheets so that I could build purplegiraffe.net with a database-stored journal. Next, I decided to learn flash so that I could spiffy up the Alpha Phi Omega website for Tau chapter (I used php to build the calendar/event system throughout the site, as well as flash to make the menu/titlebar). But, when the time came to rebuild my website in the form of prpl.net, I just couldn’t get motivated. I already knew how to use PHP, and I didn’t really want a flash site (though I did tinker around and learn how integrate MySQL data into flash). Alas, my fierce interest had died to complete apathy. The site is now run by wordpress. I did, however, spend a few days improving my Photoshop skills so that I could make the page header. In with the new, can’t be bothered with the old….

So, to answer my first question, several things come to mind as necessary pursuits given the opportunity to do anything. All of them are things I’ve thought about and wanted to do for years, but just haven’t had the chance. 1) Travel. Where? Anywhere, but definitely France, Ireland and Greece. 2) Play the cello. I wanted to do this in 3rd grade, but my parents steered me towards the (less expensive) violin. They know I’m still bitter. 3) Ride a unicycle. I have researched unicycles at least 3 different times in my life w/ the fantasy of buying one and getting good at riding it. Why? Because it would be fun.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.