surviving perfection

My cousin was almost selected to be a contestant on the new Survivor China. After making it to the final round of auditions the producers saw that, even through the most biased editing, it would be impossible to make her appear one dimensional. My cousin's lives in Hawaii and was voted back to her own island. It would have been kind of cool for her to be on the show, but what's even cooler is the fact that I won't have to watch another season of Survivor.

A couple of years ago I saw a Survivor contestant's profile on one of the morning shows. The woman's story made me cry and that made me feel very strongly about watching her on the show. While she got voted off the first episode, I stuck with it to the end. I'm like that with most all reality shows. Weather they are about backstabbing roommates or room make overs, once I start watching I won't stop till its over.

The single mindedness that reality TV brings out in me is, I believe, an example of my perfectionism. I'm not the kind of perfectionist who has to dust the knickknacks every day, I'm the kind who hasn't dusted the knickknacks ever because I don't want to do anything if a can't do everything perfectly. You know, the kind who gets on the Oprah show because of the massive amounts of crap they have horded over the years.

I am most definitely slow to start projects, especially those of the household variety. On one hand this means my bathroom is never unexpected guest ready, on the other I've yet to paint a room and be disappointed in the color. I have painted two rooms. I don't feel a great compulsion to hold on to things (when i do hold on to useless junk it's because it takes me a while to get around to getting rid of it) but that isn't to say that I'm not a hoarder. What I find it difficult to take action on and move on from are my ideas.

I write a lot and I used to hold on to the pounds of paper I'd generated. My thoughts were something I needed to keep close and reference often. When I threw all of that old material away a year ago I felt a whole lot lighter and was surprisingly inspired to work on projects I'd long before believed to be lost causes. Since then I've made it a habit to throw out most everything I hand write within a week of when it was written. I've slowly started to see what were once simply ideas transform into tangible end products. I've come a long way over the past year and I am reaching out to others as I keep my mental mess clean.

There have to be more idea mongers like me out there. While watching a reality show about hoarders I learned that they are expert at hiding their condition. If people can keep tons of stuff a secret keeping tons of ideas a secret has got to be a snap. At this point I don't know why that's important. The sense that there are others out there who share this neurosis is comforting to me and my be to others. Right now what's most important to me is that I allowed this idea to escape in all it's imperfection.