The Red Badge of Courage
I finished Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage" over the weekend and I'm sad to say it took me nearly 3 weeks to do so despite the fact it is only 100 pages. In my defense the book hardly licks along at a good pace until the last 30 pages when it really gets interesting and you feel invested. Lots of guys told me it was a great book while many girls just remembered it from school as boring.
Towards the end I found myself picturing the
forests around Georgia and the times I've been paintballing in that
environment. In my experience it seems fairly random who gets
clipped by a paintball unless you're the kind of ass who brings the BFG
of paintball guns and hides in a hole by the flag. I don't mean to
trivialize the danger of fighting with real guns by drawing the
comparison but rather to say how much it scares me to think how hard it
must be.
The fact that it took me 3 weeks to read this book is a classic signal that I'm starting to slip back on my priorities so I made the effort to review my checklist and how I'm organizing my free time. I don't know if it's because I'm a programmer but I feel like there is so much I want to read, to watch, to learn and to experiment with I regularly spread myself too thinly or focus on frivolous things at the cost of personal goals.
In an effort to keep myself on track I think sharing these goals might add some artificial pressure on myself to complete them:
- Run 30 mins every other day
- Ride to work at least once a week
- Play soccer once a week
- Participate in a 5k once a month with steadily improving times
- Practice guitar once a week besides class
- Finish one of the books in my classical literature A to Z every 3 weeks
- Finish the examples from the Eclipse 3 book
- Modify the CFEclipse parser to handle custom tags correctly
- Finish phase I of CFLunch.com to make co-ordinating the site with the meetings easier.
Of course, like many other things, there are obstacles to my progress on the horizon:
- Cubs baseball has just started up again
- An apartment to maintain which seems to be swallowing my personal belongings. Latest loss was my favorite Cubs hat. Reward of $5 dollars if you find it :-)
- Dollar burgers on a Monday night at the Union
- A week in San Francisco for the Gilbane conference
- The wedding tour as my girlfriend and I hit DC, Atlanta, New York and Birmingham (England) for a series of weddings