When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?

Every time this kind of question comes up I go through two mental processes. Who did I think about last time? Has that changed since?

Usually, I think about the last ten or so years of my life, and the people I’ve met in that time. Almost always I come back to two different people. My brother, and my father.

My Dad has led an eventful life. Many years of military service, corporate office job/life of the 90’s, and lots of education. In those areas he’s accomplished so much and when I look back on how I saw him during the years of each of those stages, I see a different man who is somehow still the same. Maybe it’s just that I got to see different sides of him and the way his core values and habits have been applied. Diligence, perseverance, and drive. Fairness, empathy, compassion, and love. All these things have been part of his success in life, and I see it in my brother.

My brother has been the one who has lived up to the image of our father the most. Although he’s the youngest of four kids, he’s managed to pull off most of the old “American Dream” better than the rest of us. A married, kids of his own, a car, and a home. He didn’t go into the military, our Dad forbid it and always said “I did the time so you wouldn’t have to,” but he’s followed a similar career path otherwise. Maybe not to the heights of Dad, but it was enough to get to where he’s at today. When I look at these two, I like to remind myself that they’re closer in reality to the success we should all strive for and not movie stars, celebrities, and corporate big wigs. Those kinds of people had a combination of luck and gaming the system. My family has busted their asses to get to where they are today. They are the ones I think about when I think “successful.”

What makes a good neighbor?

I’d like to think I’m a good neighbor, but I guess it’s kind of subjective. What’s the dynamic of the neighborhood? Is the neighborhood filled with close-knit people who have lived there for multiple years? Who have block parties and barbecues? Or does everyone seem to just keep to themselves?

My current neighborhood is the former. Older couples with adult children who come and go, and retired couples, although a couple homes have recently been purchased by younger folks. All that said, they do some block parties and a few of them throw barbecues. I’m not usually the socializing type so I’ve only ever gone to one of these block parties despite being invited each time. I don’t think that makes me a BAD neighbor, but it probably doesn’t leave a great impression on everyone else. Not that I mind.

I think that in spite of what I’ve mentioned above, I’m an okay neighbor. I have on occasion talked with my immediate neighbors a few times, and I’ve offered help whenever I see an opportunity. Granted being a homebody and staying indoors almost all day makes it difficult to see those opportunities, I still make the offers. I also try to stay vigilant of what goes on in the area since we’ve had lots of cars broken into across the city this year, and one neighbor actually had their car stolen several months back.

So, maybe boiling it down, my idea of what makes a good neighbor is just being helpful. No matter who it is, or what their situation is, just being helpful.

What could you try for the first time?

I’ve always wanted to try skydiving. That’s the first thing that comes to mind for something I would want to try for the first time. The sensation of air rushing passed you as your hurtle towards the ground. Watching videos of people doing this and similar activities I always wonder if they are feeling like they are both moving slow and incredibly fast. Those videos always make it seem like the ground below them is approaching slowly, but the sound and feel of the air rushing must make it seem confusing.

Some of my friends would vehemently disagree with the idea going so far as to say “why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” For the thrill and excitement, duh!

What would your life be like without music?

This is an older prompt that I had originally started typing out my answer to before I got distracted at work.

I had given it a fair amount of thought (maybe a couple minutes worth) because it just caught me off guard and I knew exactly how I would try to answer.

Do you ever watch a movie or tv show and notice the colors are either washed out or in a sort of grayscale? Maybe a day or two before this question came up I had watched the first episode of the anime “Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead”. When I read this prompt, that first episode was immediately what came to mind. If you haven’t seen it and are planning to watch it soon then you might stop reading here to avoid those juicy episode one spoilers.

Still with me? Cool.

When I read this prompt I had an immediate reaction and knew exactly how to portray my answer purely because of the aforementioned anime. In the first episode you watch the protagonist remember the events of their life leading up to the present. They got an office job in the city and were following their dream. They had a great first day at work and everyone in the office was jovial and welcoming. After work they all got together for dinner and drinks to celebrate. Great start! Then shit drops. You realize with horror that it was all a facade but the protagonist is trying to maintain a positive outlook and work hard. Years go by at this job filled with verbal abuse, gaslighting, and manipulation. Friendships seemingly fall apart, every day is filled with overtime to the point that everyone in the office is basically pulling all nighters all the time (with two people bragging and one upping each other for putting in 100+ hours a previous week) and it becomes quickly apparent the protagonist’s life is devoid of happiness and pleasure. Always chasing the clock, burning out to the point that one day you see them struggling to wake up in their apartment while surrounded with bags of trash that they haven’t taken to the time to take out because they’re always working. If you weren’t noticing it right away you might have missed it but at some point the world around the protagonist lost color.

Nearing the later part of this episode is when we learn about the world going to shit outside the apartment, with zombies and death and destruction. The protagonist is leaving their apartment, resigned to their fate to go to work and they encounter their first zombie. Over the next minute or so realization slowly dawns on the protagonist that they’re free. No more work. No more deadlines. No more boss yelling and belittling them. As they’re running and their memories are flashing before them they eventually see color again for the first time in years! This is when the visual aesthetic explodes with color and pushes out the grayscale reality they had been living in for so long. This moment is what came to mind so vividly when I first read the prompt “what would life be like without music” because it left such a strong impression on my mind and I had been noticing a similar feeling whenever I would put on music at work.

So, maybe not to the same explosive degree as in Zom 100, because work for me isn’t anywhere near that suffocating or all consuming, but whenever I put on music the world around me seems brighter and clearer. Perhaps that’s just me, but that’s what I think of when I think about a life without music.

What have you been putting off doing? Why?

Do I reiterate the question here as if I’m asking myself or the audience? No, that’s stupid, I’ll just answer the prompt.

This might come across as a confession (and admission) to myself more than anyone else, but I’ve been putting off everything. All of my life has been filled with procrastinating and making excuses. So maybe I’ll just put a couple out there to see who resonates.

Writing. Why? Fear, insecurity, feelings of inadequacy, impostor syndrome, the list goes on and is fairly standard as I understand it from lurking in the various writing communities on social media and discord. I think the most impactful reasons, though, stem more so from pressure and a sort of “performance” anxiety (if you could classify writing as a kind of performative activity.) For several months now I’ve also been trying to remind myself that “people can’t read what you don’t write” and it hasn’t totally helped, but hey I’m here now writing while laying in bed with one eye open when I should be trying to sleep (but I’m also killing time until my nightly routine of playing Wordle as the clock ticks 12:00am.)

Streaming, I keep putting off for similar reasons, but I’ll also add that it just takes a lot of work as well, and I work enough as it is for my day job that I really just want to sit back and enjoy my hobby time with worrying about being entertaining for a live audience. It isn’t like I had a large audience, but from the years of doing it and participating in other streamers communities I found myself enjoying my time with the friends I’ve made along that journey

Homeownership. What a massively adult decision! I’ve been putting this off for so long, but a large part was that I just never earned enough (and still don’t, technically) to afford a mortgage. My roommate has been more than accommodating and cool with me sticking with him for the better part of the last decade, so I’ve kind of just coasted along on that this whole time. I also should be getting my finances in better shape and save more money, which is just another excuse for not trying to go down this path, but then COVID hit and everything changed in the housing market here and made it that much more difficult to accomplish getting a home.

Romance. Well, with my hobbies and lifestyle this one should be self-explanatory but I’ll dive in anyway. Relationships take work and time to build up, but you really need to be meeting people to even get that started in the first place. Which is difficult because I don’t do activities or hobbies that lend themselves to meeting people (except work, but I don’t want to go into that here.)

So, there. I sat down (or laid, rather) and wrote something out. Maybe it’ll help. Maybe it won’t, but I would never know if I didn’t actually do it in the first place, and I really do want to get back in a habit of writing. My blog has been rather lonely and deserves attention, so I’ll try to answer more of these daily writing prompts in the future. (Also, if you’ve made it this far, thank you.)