Still Not King

Day One:
     Ringwraiths killed: 4. V. good.
     Met up with Hobbits. Walked forty miles. Skinned a squirrel and ate it.
     Still not King.
Day Four:
     Stuck on mountain with Hobbits. Boromir really annoying.
     Not King yet.
Day Ten:
     Sorry no entries lately. V. dark in Mines of Moria. Big Baelrog.
     Not King today either.


For those of you who aren't nerdy enough to place every obscure reference I dig up, the above is an excerpt from "The Very Secret Diary of Aragorn, Son of Arathorn," by Cassandra Clare. It's a parody of one of the characters in Lord of the Rings (if you didn't know that much, I'd smack you) and I'm about to use it to illustrate how I've been feeling about life lately.

(Oh, and for those of you who can decipher my nerdy references: Congratulations! You're a total geek!)

Lately, when I sit back and take a look at my life and the direction it's headed, the phrase "Still not King" keeps coming to mind. (Ooh! See! My crazy intro is about to make sense!) While I have no ambition to be the king of anything, I do have other as yet unrealized ambitions. "Still not a Writer," "Still not Thin," "Still not even Employed," and so on and so forth. You get the idea. It gets a bit depressing and I find myself getting discouraged all the time. There's a long road ahead of me before I can do (or be) any of those things, and - while my rational brain knows full well that any ambition requires a lot of effort to be put forward before it can become a reality - I think a small part of me is still hoping that success at one (or all) of these things will just fall into my lap.

I am, essentially, a very lazy and unambitious-type person. While I don't want to waste my life away watching Family Guy, making things happen - making life interesting - is just so much goddamn work. It's so much easier to contemplate the idea of becoming a hermit and going off into the wilderness to live and write.

Even that much requires a great deal of work, however. I'd have to buy the cabin, buy the land, pay for the trip to wherever I ended up. And then there would still be things in my life that would require a steady income from me - food, electricity (or candles), internet access... I am, rather unfortunately, unable to live out that fantasy.

Also (since there are so few restrictions on what student loan companies can do to claim payment) I think my college debt collectors would hunt me down, harvest my organs and sell them on Ebay. You can't run away from those guys. Heck, one of the reasons I'm so hesitant to go back to school to finish my lousy AA degree is because I'm so terrified of racking up more debt. Those collection agencies are ruthless.

What was I talking about before I started rambling? Ah yes. Still not King.

What I want to start doing, instead of being all discouraged about still not being king (or whatever) is to change my mindset to something more positive. You know, "Still not King... but here's something I can do today to help set a change in motion." Optimism and whatnot. Pro-activeness instead of laziness. Tenacity instead of discouragement.

It's not a perfect system, by any means. There will be bad days (lots of them, probably, as I have yet to go through Mark's first deployment or make friends) but I need to stop looking at them with such a bleak attitude. (In other words: DON'T BE SO EASILY DISCOURAGED, DARN YOU!)

I wrote a cheesy poem much to that effect in high school. It was entitled "Lemons," and it goes a little something like this:


When life hands you a lemon
you have to decide:
Will you make lemonade,
or will it hamper your pride?
When you taste the sour,
will you make it sweet?
Or will a moment without sugar
throw you offbeat?
Can you dilute
 the lemon juice with a smile,
or will you just sit
and be bitter awhile?
When life decides to toss
a lemon at you,
will you throw it back
and add an orange too?


Cheesy? Most definitely. But Elise always said she liked it, and - at any rate - it's better than the other emo crap I was always writing. (Rest assured, you will never get to read any of that nonsense.)

Anyways, I'm going to take its central message to heart: OPTIMISM! So what if I'm not King today either? At least I'm working towards it! I'll get there eventually!

You know, starting tomorrow.


By the way...

Still not King.

(Sorry to disappoint.)