Straw enthusiasm

Straw enthusiasm is probably my biggest flaw. I often find thing's I like, got all my attention into it and burn and crash some time later completely forgetting, or coming back seldom if at all. 



This is best showed on the blogs I had. The strange ideas I followed but never completed - like learning how to play a guitar. I start and make the effort to be good as what I do, but then comes the moment my enthusiasm is not enough and I need the encouragement of people close to me, peers, or whoever to show interest in what I do. Of course like everyone I seek praise for what I do. But in case of things I started in this enthusiasm flow often I expect things to change too fast, giving not enough attention to details, not promoting my achievements, expecting others to see them without any kind of encouragement. It's the wrong way and I usually forget it completely. Well there are of course things for which I have no talent at all - like gardening... all my flowers die, including cactus. I forget they exist, I actually don't care so I don't remember they need water to live. My cats have better cos they will come by and meow at me and use their paws to get my attention. Other things are not in such luck. 


Well, but we can't do everything right? I'm not good with manual things - like painting, I'm in great awe of my brother that paints little figures with details that are maybe a millimeter long. Painters and artists that take pencil in hand and with few strokes create pictures I could only dream of doing. I'm more stick people person. I can't play music instruments, the guitar episode, and any school episodes with instruments only confirmed it further. I can't sing... well if you exclude drink singing, sometimes it happens I do sing, and sometimes it's even correct... no one lost his hearing because of me.. yet. I can't do many things - but it's okay, I don't have to. Thanks to my straw enthusiasm I at least tried them...


Sometimes it worked in favor and I got a hobby. Sometimes it was just fun times till it lasted and then I found something new. There are those few things that stayed with me - and I'm quite sure it has something to do with the discovery I'm good at it. Well that, and that I enjoy it plays a big role, but also there are people that says they enjoyed what I did too. How much are we driven by what other people think about us and the things we do? I like to think I'm not so much, but in end effect we are all creatures of praise. We like to hear a good review.


I fall in love with television and various series when I convinced my parents to cable TV. Oh what and improvement was that - suddenly from four, not very interesting channels we had over sixty with various languages to choose. It was a start of very long series mania for me, I'm still series maniac... It also pushed me into languages, not that I speak many of them, but I did inherit from my mom ability to understand if I really try a language I don't know. TV allowed me to listen to few languages and I did actually learn German from TV, the courses came later. I learned English from reading books but mostly? First and foremost from Harry Potter and then series, series and fanfiction. Yes one thing lead to another... for me the doors of fanfiction world was opened by Roswell and then Stargate or maybe other way around? Probably. But with Roswell I wrote my first fanfic, got awfully disappointed in readers and kept to reading only. I wrote few pieces of original work, five or six within a ten year span is not much. But when I came back to writing it wasn't the straw enthusiasm I had in the beginning, this time I was more mature and more aware of what I want to write and how to do it. I'm ridiculous happy every time someone leaves review, even if it's short like - loved it, good work, or whatever. Especially for pieces I don't really find so good - which is strange cos the ones I think are good are usually not so good in readers opinions. That's something to take in and consider and then try to write next piece better and better each time.


Besides writing there is also numbers crunching - I was good at math at school, I liked math till I get to college... Advanced math was a big no no in my books, especially when we moved to strange things like stings... I could survive differential equations, integrals and matrices but stings killed my believe in math. Programming was too part of straw enthusiasm that evaporated after first year in high school, and keep evaporating since then. I liked block schemes and that's probably why I like so much numbers crunching - it's just getting millions of data together and putting them in small schemes that give you answers. Analyzing them is like following simple instructions - that comes from that and in end gives another that. Easy. 


There are some other things I enjoy too like photography, or walking, trekking around some mountains. Do I enjoy them cos I'm good at it? Doing good photos, not fabulous, but simply good, or that I walk faster than others? That's for sure. But I think the main point in some of the activities is I don't need others to tell me I'm good at it, I can tell that myself. I will not be disappointed if others will not start to praise me the minute I publish something or do something and broadcast what I did. 


Seems I grew up a little, but just a little bit, I don't leave things if there are not praised. Well except in that little moment when it's the straw enthusiasm beginning and I'm not really hooked up yet. Like with blogging, well see how long that one will keep.