perfectionism is hard work

I challenged myself to do this, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

I’ve owned this domain since January of ’06, and although I had some slick plans for it in the beginning, I managed to find other ways to occupy my time. Seriously, though — I even had this killer image to use in the header/branding that I banged off of a double decker bus in Vegas.

But here we are, 10 months later, and to date, deucetwo.com has never amounted to anything more than a testing domain for some of my clients’ sites.

Tangent

So this site, in its new iteration, is an experiment. I’m so left-brained it’s ridiculous. With an engineering degree, an annoyingly long list of regimented daily routines, and a mild case of ADD (read: a nice excuse), I find it incredibly hard to just let my mind and my ideas flow.

Every enterprising synapse from the right brain is Galaga-zapped by a counterproductive, conservative strike from the regulatory neurons in the left brain. It’s kinda like prison, only not. It’s like I know there’s so much more to be tapped — so much more of this creativity that has me intrigued to the point of obsession — that I just have to find a way to unleash it.

At like 12:10 am this morning, I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to turn deucetwo.com into a stream of consciousness experiment. It’s the antithesis of what pearsonified.com has become. My “other site” is a thought-intensive, complicated bitch of a Web site. I love it; I hate it. Good thing I’m never ambivalent.

If you’ve ever perused the archives on Pearsonified, you may have come across a time when my writing was more about personality than information delivery…I suppose the same is still true, at least to some degree, but when you’re conveying information with the intent of delivering it to the masses, some of the magic is lost in translation.

I can’t use gestures, body language, or facial expressions to really put on a show on my blog. Agh, and everything has to make sense. Sometimes entertainment doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, weirder still, entertainment gets the point across in an unintended way.

That’s magic.

It’s hard to plan magic.

I don’t even try.

Tubetorial is different from Pearsonified because of the whole “mini-movie” angle, and that aspect of things is great. Over there, I can at least use vocal inflection to convey “me” along with the stated message of the Tubetorial.

You see, that’s something that a lot of people fail to think about whenever they’re communicating online (or even publicly)…When you give a presentation, have a lunch meeting, or do anything like this, the one message that you’re always conveying is you.

I guess maybe I feel like I don’t convey “me” through my writing very well. I swear, sometimes I’ll go back and read some of what I’ve written, and I find it odd that those words came out of my mouth, at least figuratively speaking. Yet other times, I feel like some of my words are just absolutely chock full of me-dom.

And on top of this, how absolutely vain and narcissistic is it to even be considering such things? After all, the great paradox of operating on the Web is that my presence here really isn’t about me at all — it’s all about you.

So is this deucetwo.com thing just a bad idea? Is it a hoax? Are all of my tip-of-the-cerebrum thoughts so self-centered?

You know, it just occurred to me that I don’t even remember how this post began. I suppose if I stopped my train of thought here and actually tried to recall, I probably could. But to be honest, I don’t want to break this roll because it would belie my entire reason for being here.

It’s 1:45 am here, and I’ve been half-tweaking the Cutline theme to get the totally incomplete design you see here (if you see this before it’s all fixed up). I’m listening to trance music on di.fm, and it’s fairly loud considering the late (early?) hour.

You know, I tried polyphasic sleeping last year — I can’t really remember if it was November, December, or January — and I thought it sucked. My body was so freaked out it was ridiculous. I’ve been living what I would consider to be a “very healthy” lifestyle for the past 6 years or so, save for a few random months of poor choices…and I think that my body has settled into a place where it needs what it needs. And what it needs are at least 6 solid hours of sleep.

But I did kind of morph the polyphasic sleeping into a biphasic pattern, and that worked out pretty nicely for a while. The best part was that I would force myself to get up at like 6 am, and I found that the hours between 6 and 9 tended to be quite productive. I enjoy productivity. I swear, though — that bastard is like the holy grail — it’s so damn hard to find!

I’m actually in the middle of an epiphany that is centered on the absolute irony that is this post. Here, I’ve been stale as a month old slice of bread for the past few weeks, and now all of the sudden, I’ve got more streaming ideas than you can shake a stick at.

I wonder if writing things like this is a really great way to start your day as a creative professional. You know, to knock out some of the anticipation and energy that accompany the start of a new day. Also, I think that for me, my brain needs to be loosened up a bit before I can really produce something worth salvaging and/or turning into a “deliverable.”

There’s a nice corporate crap-word for ya — deliverable. I used to hate that word. Now I kind of embrace it. It’s mine now, because I own what I create. It’s really liberating; you should try it sometime.

I just got sidetracked by an IM. If I blew up my IM client for the next 6 months, would that allow me to become a millionaire any faster? What if it meant shaving months off of that time frame?

I’d quit this chatting shit so fast it would make your head spin.

I say that, of course, knowing that it’s likely true, and yet do you see me closing my IM client?

No. Hell no. What the fuck is my problem, then?

I think I love distraction. If it bothered me that much, I would probably get rid of it, just like I did all the bad things in my life that used to distract me and get me down.

IM never really got me down. In fact, it’s been a great tool for connecting and sharing with people, which I suppose is why I haven’t pulled the plug on it yet.

I remember that back in college, it was taboo to “meet someone online.” But I met plenty of girls online. My experience in that arena has been so far beyond “decidedly positive” that it’s ridiculous.

Bottom line here is that I highly recommend it, and don’t worry about the taboos. You can laugh all the way to the tang, my friend.

We’re friends, right?

If you see me at a conference (say, SXSW), holler at me. I’ll buy you a water. Not just any water, either. Evian. The expensive shit. That’s how I roll.

I’ve noticed that my thoughts have become a little less refined, and my mind is now riddled with cusswords and useless cliches.

I just looked up the word aphorism because I was going to use it in that sentence. I thought it meant “story” or “adage,” and I chose to look up the word before using it because I was thinking that it probably didn’t belong in that paragraph (sentence) above. I was right.

Do you think anyone will be disappointed if everyone finds out that I’m really not nearly as smart as everyone thinks?

If making money was more of a direct competition, I’d be fucking brilliant at it. That’s been the story of my life. Make it a competition; watch Chris excel. Yet “work” is like the wild wild West. Buncha gunslingers out here all doing their own thing; making products; coding frameworks; launching things; schmoozing.

Hell, I’m not even sure what it’s about anymore. Your network? Your friends? Your product?

I love my product. If I die tomorrow, those products will be there. They’ll be mine. People will look to them when they want to find information about me.

For some reason, that thought makes me really emotional. I’m comforted by it, though, so I guess it’s okay.

A year on the web

You know, I didn’t purchase my first domain name until October 3^rd of last year. Think about this for a second. I had no skills at the time. All I knew was that I wanted to have my own Web site, and I was also going to be the guy to design it.

And now look, one year later…I’ve just put together a little playground of a site to deal with all the trappings of having too many commitments and too little time.

Ah well. So far, this site is fun. I feel a little bit more free than I did 2 hours ago.

That’s what this whole journey — life, I guess — is all about for me. Each day I want to be a little more free than I was the day before. Truth is, the progression doesn’t quite work out that way, but I also know that in the long term, this whole thing is trending upward.

Here’s to learning more, doing more, and having a bigger impact on the rest of the world. Here’s to freedom. Here’s to deucetwo.com.