60 Minutes

It’s 2:32PM on Sunday, March 15, 2009 and I’m giving myself 60 minutes to finish writing this post. To some that may seem like an eternity, to others a heartbeat. I skew toward the former which, as I’ve said before, is the whole point of my blog – I need to practice writing and especially writing quickly.

My biggest problem is that I’m rarely, okay never, entirely satisfied and the notion of settling for good enough just seems like taking the easy way out. Step one is to get to acceptable in less time than it now takes to get to good enough. By now I should be on step 2 or 3 but I never really engaged in step 1 so here I am at status quo.

It’s now 2:45PM. Managing to complete 2 short paragraphs in 13 minutes isn’t a great sign but I’m not overly concerned because I plan to cheat. To be more precise, I already have cheated because I laid out the framework for this post in my insomniac haze last night. If I don’t say so myself, I can be brilliant in my insomniac haze but the cruel reality is that when the haze clears my brainstorms usually evaporate with it. This time I was a little lucky though because I simply organized some ideas that have occurred to me over time. My plan for this post is to write snippets of ideas for subsequent posts. I can then noodle on them a bit and hopefully knock out the posts fairly quickly. Clever, isn’t it? Yes, it is a rhetorical question. In no particular order…

Helen of Troy
As some of my fellow Toastmasters know, a while back I spent some quality treadmill time listening to an audio books version of Homer’s Iliad. Needles to say, or maybe not, endorphins and oxygen deprivation certainly gave me a unique perspective on the tale as evidenced by my contest speech – Life’s a speech, and then you die. Helen didn’t make the cut and is almost parenthetical to the entire saga. That intrigued me a bit so I thought I’d take a closer look at Helen. After all, she’s supposed to be easy on the eyes.

Fairy tales
When I was a child I had a fondness for fairy tales. Not so much the Red Riding Hood an Cinderella type but more like the Brothers Grimm and the more magical and cerebral varieties. Only echoes of them remain now but lately those echoes have been haunting me. Why, I really can’t say but I’ll think about it and get back to you.

Ironies and Paradoxes
I’m fascinated and plagued by both. This one will take some thought though. Some so called paradoxes really aren’t all that tough to solve which of course means they aren’t paradoxes at all. My two favorite non-paradoxes are 1) the chicken and the egg and 2) an irresistible force encountering an immovable object.

Are we doomed?
Or more precisely, is America doomed? Talk about ironies, we’re depending on Communist China to hold the mortgage on the future of our capitalist Republic. As if that isn’t ironic enough, the leaders of the People’s Republic are warning us against run away social spending.

Mental blocks
Like the one I’m having now. Fortunately this one doesn’t matter all that much because my hour is up.