When you’re young, you perceive adult life to be professional and business-like. Everything is concrete, solid. When an adult tells you when and where something will happen, they are right. When you get older, you start to see that some of them are people. Your parents forget things, your family breaks promises. You realize that things the world isn’t as neat as it seemed.
But now that I’m (technically) an adult, I see that nothing really matters. Nothing is really as hard as I was lead to believe, and nobody is professional. Bosses are lazy and tell you things you shouldn’t know or make you do things you’re not qualified to, people steal things without getting caught regularly. You hear these stories through friends and family, if you don’t see them yourself. The world is made out to be a much more rigid and unforgiving place than it really is.I learned recently that in college, some people stress out that they didn’t study as hard for an exam as they should have. They spent the unholy hours of the night before ‘BS’ing their way through an essay that was due that morning. Do they get bad grades? Sometimes, sure, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Nobody sits at home spending as many hours as possible writing that essay about goat agriculture. It’s just not done. Nobody wants to do it.  We’ll try to do it with as little effort as possible. Is that a bad thing? Technically, but it’s just how things are.

I never give everything one hundred percent. People say they do and they like to give the impression that they do, but in reality people only dedicate that effort to things that they will enjoy doing. I put a substantial amount of effort into writing because I enjoy writing and world-building. The Archive is my one hundred percent because I love working on it. Nothing school related gets that sort of attention. Nobody does that.

So next time you’re stressing out that you’re going to get a bad grade on the essay because you forgot the Works Cited page, don’t sweat it. There will be people in that class that wrote it the night before, but not even the person that always “works hard for the A” put their maximum effort into it. Many of those people just know what the teacher is looking for and shoot for that, or know how to look better than everyone else.

Your bike at the bike rack doesn’t have to look impervious to being stolen. It just has to look harder to steal than the one next to it. The same analogy can be made for houses, by the way. If your home looks like it has a harder security than your neighbors’, you’re less likely to get robbed.

So, while it’s a nice sentiment to maintain, you really don’t have to give things one hundred percent of your effort. If everybody gives sixty percent, be the person that puts in sixty-five. It isn’t much, but it will show. And it’ll look like you gave one hundred and five percent of your effort!

P.S. I wrote a fake blog post a few days ago for today. It was when I was delirious from exhaustion, but I still needed to write for the day. I thought I might as well include it, but it’s basically nonsense just for the sake of hitting five hundred words.

My original intention was not to write a blog post at all today. That’s especially important because I want to not write a blog post every day to allow the schedule to catch up so I can write more current blogs. I had intended to work on The Archive, as there is currently no shortage of information that needs to be added, in every section of the work, in fact. But as it stands I’d rather not modify it with the brain capacity I am currently operating at.

More than likely this won’t even be posted, because I’m not really even saying anything useful! Not even trying, in fact. I’m just typing the words that my head thinks of. Don’t let this happen to you, kids. But if you do, make sure you remain consistent and don’t let yourself slip with your diets/exercise plans/ habits you’re trying to break or anything. If you show yourself any weakness, you lose. I will not show any weakness. The Daily Dose of Derailment will not die, least of all not only after a few months, that’s just embarrassing. At this level it still isn’t really a big accomplishment. If I give up now, it’ll still be “a thing I tried”. So I can’t let that happen.

In other news, I’ve recently developed habits of listening to very specific music for very specific circumstances. When playing video games I’m listening to Perfume, and when writing Dreamscape I’m listening to the Ori and the Blind Forest soundtrack. Never played the game, but it’s music is real good. But also if I listened to Perfume or songs with lyrics I actually know it would distract me from writing, and I can’t let that happen.

You know, five hundred really doesn’t seem like a large number. I’ve written that as a minimum for months straight now, sometimes writing twice that. A few days ago I wrote three thousand words and I probably would have kept going if I hadn’t accomplished what I was working on that day. Today, though, it seems like a mountain that is going to kill me before I reach the top. What do I even do at this point? Do I just keep writing for the sake of word count? I’m not even saying anything, this is just BS that is meaningless but words have to be said regardless of what they are. I think I remember reading somewhere that even if you write the letter ‘A’ over and over five hundred times it’s still at least something, but right now I can’t think for the life of me how that would improve your writing. Honestly, though, I can’t  see how this will improve my writing, either. I think this is mostly for the principle of writing than for actually practicing writing itself.

Through this, I’m hammering into the brain that I cannot skip a day. And this is punishment that I had not the foresight to write when I had more free time earlier in the morning. Foresight.