Modern Day Renaissance Man

I've decided what I want to do for a living, and even though it took a few days of pondering and tossing and turning and a dentist appointment and a car tuneup, I think I've come up with a pretty viable solution.

What do I want to do? Easy. Everything. I want to do every little thing my heart desires.

I want to be a modern-day renaissance man, a Polymath to the highest degree. I want to wake up to the coffee whose company board I sit on, play nine holes of golf with the clubs that I helped market, do an interview with the paper I write a regular op/ed piece for about the newest programming language I've helped fund, and then come home and work on my latest novel.

I want to do all these things because I can not stop piling things on my plate. It's really become something of a happy-disease, if there can be said to be such a thing. Today I am reading a programming manual on Ruby on Rails, a novel by Philip K. Dick, The New Yorker, The Economist, a text on Aesthetic Theory, and the philosophy of GWF Hegel. I'm listening to archives of Tony Pierce's podcasts, NPR interviews, transcripts of the Daily Show, albums by Louis XIV and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and instructions on how to cook Duck a l'orange for dinner this coming weekend.

I thrive when I'm busy and I die a little on the inside when I'm not. I'm late for everything because if I'm bored for one minute waiting, then I think I might go a tad nuts. I can't see myself giving 100% to one specific field of study or even area of momentary focus; I need to be active in everything, all the time.

Maybe it's all an effort to leave my mark in as many places as possible; maybe it's just feeling the market for what kind of a career I hope to rise to someday.

Still, I'm not sure that it's that temporary: I think I'm going to be this shade of crazy my whole life, I'm afraid.

Ah well. Worse things can happen.

Thanks for the comments: Teddy (Pssst: I have a new uberwhitespaced blog coming up. You might like it), Christian Montoya, Brian Smith, Aaron Post, Fil, who is totally right.

PS: new post over at FadTastic. Enjoy!

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