And speaking of perfection....

I've decided to fail. Now this isn't exactly brought on the really funny website called www.Failblog.org, but I could pretend that is where I got my inspiration. Still, in my last post I wrote about perfection, and I realized that I've been working on everyday kind of failing recently.

Take today, I failed to stop playing Bejeweled after 10 min. And yesterday, I failed to make a roast chicken for dinner when a friend came over and we just had pizza and some tomato cucumber salad to eat instead.

Often these failures just happen and, after the fact, I try not to give myself a hard time about them. Certain cases are harder than others. But at other times (and this is what I'm working on increasing), I decide ahead of time to fail. Like with the pizza vs. chicken. Or with not having a spotless apartment for visitors to come to. Or, on a larger scale, I decided recently to fail at writing an article from my thesis.

Now that one is a big fail for me. But it has been hanging over my head, as something I've wanted to do for a long time, and it was just making me feel bad. No matter what otherwise productive good day I'd had, I still hadn't started on an article for a peer reviewed journal.

But who am I kidding? I did the research in a department which wasn't mainly focussed on either that topic or the methodology, it was not really in any of my committee members' specialty, I'm not in a research group now and really have no mentoring for that kind of project, and I don't plan to go into academia anytime soon. So it really isn't that big of a fail considering the circumstances, and my days are really much more pleasant when I decide that it is off the list. (That is another nasty feature of this...I sometimes have to decide to fail on the same item more than once).

Anyway, I'm going to go walk the dog now, and then I'm thinking I might win (instead of failing) at doing some online research, sending out some emails and working on a short little article based on my research which is due in mid-November. I told you I was still working on the failing.

Oh, and tonight I'm making that chicken.