And now for something completely different.

I’ve been fed up with myself lately. See, I’ve got an annoying, mile-long perfectionist streak and sometimes it prevents me from doing the things I want. How? Let’s use updating my blog as an example.

If you’ve been reading along, you probably now know far more about Cuba than you ever cared to. When I returned from my last trip a couple months ago, I was all gung-ho about sharing my experiences – I think the initial veracity with which I attacked my keyboard vouches for that. Eventually, though, as the trip fell further and farther (what’s up with those words, anyway?) behind me, I lost the valuable initiative that kept me cranking out ordered ASCII characters.

Ever since I crossed that nebulous line where my writing libido had decreased, it’s been a struggle to finish the Cuba Guide. Not only that, but I think I lost my theme – I always intended my entries to be a guide about what to expect in Cuba with a healthy dose of “Arlo in Cuba Anecdotes.” Somewhere along the way (the intro?), I lost site of that and simply wrote about what one can do there.

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Way back in junior high, I had an English class in which we were assigned a writing project. I forget the details, but I do remember that when our teacher gave us the homework, we all thought that the minimum page requirement (Five pages? Three?) was extreme. Here we were in eighth grade and we’re supposed to write high school-length papers. Was she kidding?

The topic was something along the lines of, “What you would do if you were stuck on a deserted island?” I was freaked, but once I actually began writing, I found that I enjoyed the process immensely. I thought up the situation that put me on the deserted island (a shipwreck), described the survival materials I found in the wreckage, wrote in a fellow student as another protagonist, and then had us befriend a tiger. At some point along the way I discovered that writing five pages wouldn’t be a problem… keeping the story under ten would be.

I kept that paper right up until my unfortunate storage fire last year. I don’t think I ever actually went back and read it – I’m sure it was awful – but I do recall seeing the big “A++” on the cover page. If nothing else, I probably wrote more than any other student in the class.

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