Complex Numbers

Revisited: "Challenge Complete"

Today's cruise on the river of time takes us back to the end of January, 2019. This was a 30 Day Blogging Challenge month, and for context, my current daily blogging streak wouldn't start for another ten and a half months. And, of course, it was before everyone's lives got disrupted.

The entry itself, "Challenge Complete" , featured the kind of prompt I came to expect for the final entry into that challenge:

Write a list of at least 5 blogging prompts to add to the Challenge War Chest to be used for future rounds of the 30DBC. Then, use one of your own prompts to write your entry.

I've never really enjoyed coming up with prompts. Scratch that; I do enjoy it; it's just that when I'm expected to create one, my mind goes blank. I know this sounds odd from someone who's been judging "The Writer's Cramp"  [13+] and therefore coming up with a prompt almost every week for nearly two decades, but there you have it. I just think of it as another challenge for myself.

The actual prompt list I came up with is uninspiring to me even now, and I won't quote it here. It's there at the link if you want. I'll just address some of the other things I said in the entry.

I don't know who coined the term "bucket list," and I can't be arsed to find out.

Unlike most words and phrases, they've traced that phrase in its "things to do before you die" sense to a precise moment.  

I do know that it became the title of a moderately interesting movie with Jack Nicholson and God.

According to that link I just did, the phrase's origin and the movie title came from the same place.

While I've been known to use the phrase from time to time, I usually call it my "fuck-it list." This is because I've already done most of what I set out to do, and have given up on the rest.

Good to see my attitude hasn't changed in five and a half years.

It's come to my attention recently that life is much less frustrating if you can separate "things that I cannot control" from "things that I can control," and to focus on the latter while letting go of the former. This is something akin to the infamous Serenity Prayer, which I resent because a) it's a prayer and b) it's associated with AA, and AA is for quitters.

That's not my actual problem with AA, but it made a decent joke.

I've been walking every day for the past 5 weeks, which is, like, a new record for me for exercise.

I should have kept track of my record for "days without formal exercise." It'd be a lot longer.

Say I want to take a trip to space. How can I make that happen? Well, probably by paying Virgin Galactic a very large sum of money to fire me into a suborbital trajectory that technically takes me 100km up for a fraction of a minute, thus putting me, by definition, in space.

I think that particular venture never took off (pun intended). Branson lofted himself into a suborbital trajectory, but his maximum altitude was somewhat less than the accepted boundary of "space." Pretty sure I wrote about it in here at the time. Then Virgin declared bankruptcy. Or something. I can't keep up with all the rocketing these days.

Honestly, even if I were a billionaire, this would strike me as a colossal waste of money.

While I accept that other people wouldn't find it so, paying any amount of money for fame and bragging rights.

So here's the real example: I want to be published.

Yeah, not so much anymore.

Not much else of note. Kind of a boring entry, even now. Only one joke that I could find, and it wasn't even original.

Can't be "on" all the time, I suppose, but some challenges are never complete until the day you kick the bucket.