Wednesday, April 30, 2008

afraid to fail

My older brother has a blog entitled Cursed with Ambition. This title, he says, reflects what drives him despite his preference for sloth. The title of this blog is meant to point out one of the many ways in which my brother and I are different. I am not cursed with ambition. Some will argue that I simply must be having done well in school, become a physician, and married the girl of my dreams. Those people are wrong.

A crippling fear of failure, rather than ambition, has been my driving force. I did not study my ass off in college because I was driven to be the smartest or most successful. I did so because the prospect of losing my scholarship inspired visions of hell that Dante could not bring himself to entertain.

Let me put it this way. My brother is like Han Solo. He doesn't want to care. He doesn't want to help. He doesn't want to be badass. But he can't help himself. He never had a chance of NOT swooping in to save Luke's ass at the Death Star.

I am like Luke Skywalker in Empire. Afraid to fail my friends. Afraid that I can't accomplish my goals. Afraid of my father. I hope that at some point in my life I become Luke from Return of the Jedi, but that script has yet to be written.

That explains the title of this blog. What remains, however, is to explain this blog itself. Future installments will look nothing like this initial post. For this sort of rambling, pointless self-examination you can see my other blog, where you can be sporadically treated to everything from warped revisions of children's book classics, to treatises on comic books that no one reads*, to rants against the Veterans Administration Medical Center. With the occasional picture of the prettiest girl in the whole wide world for good measure.

This blog will be entirely different. Every Wednesday for 52 weeks there will be a post (unless I am on call on Wednesday, in which case posts will be on Tuesday). Each post will consist of a strip from Charles Schulz's Peanuts with the punchline replaced by a quote from my dad, who is eminently quotable. If I feel compelled I will provide some context for the quotes used in the post.

This may be really dumb. It may be hilarious. We'll find out, starting one week from today.

And for those who know my dad, if you have any quotes you'd like to see featured, leave 'em in the comments. (I already have a list of 52 quotes, but I'll remain open to suggestions.)

* It's the treatises that no one reads. The comic books are actually quite popular.