Passion Revisited

 

I was reading an older post of mine from a couple of years ago about passion and how I wanted to throw myself into blogging more. I think I’ve said that several times in more than one post.  I almost feel like I’ve been making excuses for it.

I’ve told myself and have told you guys many times, “I want to work more on my blog, but things just keep coming up.”

Summer is upon us and even my anti-social, introverted self must make an effort to be social. Which I think I have been through meetups and workshops in the tech community. I guess my most of my social ventures have had more of a professional purpose rather than just “catching up” or  “hanging out”.

I know and you know for a fact that if I REALLY ^N (really to the power of some large integer) wanted to work on my blog, I would schedule it in my phone and agenda. As I do with my own personal workouts.   It would have been marked as a task to cross off and I would have used that SMART acronym to help me get sh*t done (love that phrase).

You may ask, so what else what you been doing? So I ended up dropping that digital marketing course, because I felt my interest in learning how to code was stronger. StackSocial had a sale for an online interactive boot camp, which was a way cheaper alternative to an in-person version ($47 vs. thousands of dollars). I’m currently learning how to use an IDE (integrated developer environment) while learning (again, because repetition is the best teacher) about Ruby on Rails. I feel that this is a good solution for the time being.

Silly as this seems, but I love how developers and designers have all these stickers on their laptop. It has resurrected my love for stickers! There’s a really cool startup called StickerYou that makes cool custom stickers. I wasn’t planning on doing take home gifts for the guests, but custom stickers would be fun!

I’m learning new choreography for my group fitness classes. Planning what you’re going to teach and learning it so you can teach it takes A LOT more time than you think.  At least for me it does- it’s mental memory + muscle memory. I still absolutely LOVE it and the feeling I get from it. It has built my confidence immensely, communication skills and made me less afraid of trying new things/taking on a challenge.

I’m continuing to fill my schedule with tech meetups to get free food and booze, uh, I mean network and learn about what’s going on in the tech community. As someone who is absolutely TERRIFIED of meeting new people on my own, (That’s a double whammy of potential social anxiety right there) I have joined a bunch and will venture out to more on my own. Sometimes they have free workshops where you can learn about a certain analytics/design/etc tool or programming language. It’s a good way to help you decide if you want to take a part-time or even full-time course on that subject.

I have signed up for a couple more of Ladies Learning Code workshops because they are just so fun, awesome, affordable and informative. Really.

I’m reading a book about startups and also reading (yes I will sometimes read more than one book at the same time. Hard-core bibliophile here) Mindy Kaling’s autobiography. Damn that girl is LOL funny.  Like actually laughing out loud and not just saying lol. Same with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler of course.

So now I am realizing my obvious dilemma: I HAVE TOO MANY PASSIONS and not enough time to devote a lot of time to all. I can’t just live and breathe one or two particular things. Maybe it’s my version of FOMO. Fear of missing out on discovering a potential passion?!?!?

Of course, the poor blog always gets the shaft.  Like the sometimes neglected middle child? Although  I can’t really say that’s an accurate comparison because 1. I’m the oldest and there are no “middle children” in my family and 2. My fiance is the middle child and he says he never felt overlooked and/or neglected.

How you feel towards certain passions can change and new ones can emerge from old ones such as how the coding passion emerged from the blogging passion which originally emerged from being obsessed with saving money and making more money. Surprisingly, it didn’t come from my childhood passion of writing.

My passion for traveling is still there. I could really use an out of the country vacation right about now. I still want to go on a honeymoon somewhere far away and exotic, even though it may not necessarily be right away. I think I would want to breathe and relax a bit before rushing off to somewhere.

My love of eating baked goods will always be there, but my love for making them is slowly fading. My kitchen aid maker sits on the kitchen counter patiently waiting to be used again.

My fiancé seems to have the same problem too. Too many interests in many different things. The only difference between us is that he’s actually an almost expert (at least to me) in all of them, whereas I am a noob who’s a master in nothing thus far.

Do you feel you have too many passion projects on the go? What are some of your current passion projects you’re working on? What have you baked lately?

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