Famous lookalikes and my love of JGL

One of the best parts of summer, right up there with street fairs, sundresses & flip flops, and trips to the Frying Pan, are outdoor concerts.

In the last week alone I have been to 3 summer concerts: Cake, Blues Traveler/Barenaked Ladies, and Incubus/Linkin Park. It was a week of high school throwback shows and I never thought I would say this but I'm a little concert-ed out right now.

But this post isn't about that. This post is about a revelation I had during the Linkin Park show.

This is Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park's primary songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist, and rapper (as opposed to Chester Bennington, the guy who does all the screaming. I wrote about him in my post about how rock stars are too skinny).

This is Josh Radnor, AKA the guy who plays Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother.

Let's look at them together.

These guys are TWINSIES.

If you like Linkin Park and you like How I Met Your Mother, you can probably understand how distracting it is to go through the entire concert feeling like Ted Mosby is rapping at you. But still - GOOD CONCERT.

Also, I think Mike Shinoda is adorable (Josh Radnor too, obviously). He's half Japanese, and I was going to say something about how maybe I have a thing for half-Asian men because of how much I absolutely adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but then I googled it and apparently JGL is very much white and not at all Asian.

Was I the only person who thought this? Anyway, JGL is Jewish, which I probably should have guessed with a last name like Levitt. The only thing this can possibly mean is that SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE HIM MY PHONE NUMBER IMMEDIATELY.

JGL, my mom and grandma will love you! Let's get married.

See? We'd be a totally cute couple.

When Motivation is MIA

Like anyone else, I have a few things I don't like about myself (sometimes it's more than few things, you know how it is).

One of the traits I really wish I didn't have is the fact that I'm a lazy sack of crap. Well, sort of. I'm really good about waking up at ungodly hours to go to the gym, and I will frequently leave Brooklyn to trek into Manhattan when a lesser woman might succumb to the siren song of sweatpants and Netflix.

What I'm trying to say, really, is that I'm straight up terrible at learning new skills. I have zero patience for being bad at things and zero desire to work hard to achieve something when the initial stages of getting towards that goal are boring.

Let me give you two examples. Let's say I wanted to get better at photography (I don't, FYI. There's no need to work on photography skills when the only pictures you take are of the variety where you stick your arm out and take a picture of yourself while wasted with your girls at a bar). I could take classes or read stuff or ask a camera-savvy friend for help, and I'd hopefully get better and enjoy the process along the way. The reason why I would enjoy it is because, even if the pictures I took were god awful, I'd still be taking pictures.

As a second example, let's say I wanted to learn to play the guitar, which I did when I was 19. I spent a fair amount of time teaching myself what I could learn from the internet and eventually graduated to actual lessons. 6 months into it, I quit. Why? Because unlike photography and the shitty starter photos, the beginning stages of learning the guitar don't really involve a whole lot of playing the guitar, and what I really wanted out of it was to be good enough to play a ton of songs or jam with other people and all I was doing was taking too long to switch between chords while trying to keep up with Weezer's Island in the Sun.

I know a lot of people who love the thrill of watching their own progress with a new skill, and I am both jealous of and mystified by those people. Improvement is wonderful, but I have an extremely short attention span and I lose interest in things at the point when the novelty wears off yet I realize how many more hours of work I need to put in in order to be even mildly successful.

I don't mind practicing basic skills in volleyball, because I've been playing for 15 years and while I have tons of room for improvement, I'm good enough to play RIGHT NOW. Yet I know I will probably never take up karate, something I would love to do and that my dad has been saying for years that I would be great at (and he would know - he has a black belt, as does my brother), because all I want to do is break boards and I'm pretty sure they don't let you do that when you're a white belt.

This is why I relish the opportunities that involve being externally motivated, particularly ones that involve specific timelines. Schooling of any kind is a great way to force myself to build up new skills. I'm pretty sure that if someone had just given me a math textbook when I was younger and expected me to do some self-directed learning, I still wouldn't know what 2 plus 2 is. Even when I took bartending classes 3 years ago - I learned how to make all sorts of fancy drinks (all of which I have sadly forgotten) because I HAD TO. Would I have ever taught myself to make a ton of different martinis? Absolutely not.

I don't know how to change this about myself, but I want to. I feel like I'm missing out on so many interests or hobbies that I might enjoy but that I'm too lazy to even think about getting started on because I know how bored I'm going to get. And the thought of how good I'd be at the guitar or karate or anything else if I had just found the motivation to FUCKING DO IT ALREADY just makes me all sorts of sad. Yet I'm doing absolutely nothing to change that.

I suppose there's the option of finding a way to create some sort of external push to learn things, but I can't afford to take classes or lessons for every little thing that I might want to do. And besides, learning to motivate yourself is probably something I should figure out sooner rather than later.

So what do I do here? Do I find a way to become less lazy, or do I just stick to things that, like photography, I can be productive at even while being bad at them? Because it's really the lack of accomplishing anything that drives me away.

Suggestions welcome!


This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here.

Introducing...

I'm very excited to introduce a new weekly series here at Not the Mermaid. It's called...Stratejoy Monday!

If you've read any blog post that I've put up at all over the last few months, you probably couldn't miss my numerous references and links to my Stratejoy blog, where I've been writing every Monday for the last 5 months about trying to deal with the rough patch known as the quarterlife crisis.

For anyone who missed out on all those posts, just know that I started blogging about having no job and no confidence and, through the months of personal development and awesome support from the Stratejoy community and the other 6 ladies who took over the other days of the week, I was able to turn my attitude around and make some pretty big leaps toward getting out of the funk I was in. Over the course of those 5 months I learned to embrace my looks, stop relying on alcohol to solve my problems, and embrace who I am without feeling like I constantly don't measure up. I emerged from this experience still without a job (though I have a temp job, yay), but I have way more confidence now.

For the super abridged version of my entire season, I suggest reading my very first post, the post about the time a good friend called me fat on my birthday, and my last post.

That last post went up on Monday, and to say I'm sad about it is a gross understatement. I got so much out of being forced to write openly and honestly every week, things which are admittedly not always in my wheelhouse. I got SO much out of it, in fact, that I decided to continue my efforts. And so while I won't be writing at Stratejoy.com anymore, I will continue to post, every Monday, right here. I am by no means out of areas to explore about who I am and what I'm capable of and I'm excited to continue growing as a person and hopefully as a writer.

I think it'll be a welcome batch of fresh energy on this blog, which, despite being a personal blog, doesn't always actually get that personal.

And if any of my fellow Stratejoy season 6 bloggers are reading this (Hi Caiti, Jill, Rachel, Camila, Cassie and Sarah!), I hope you guys will do the same!

Just to close everything out, here are the Stratejoy posts of mine that I haven't yet linked to:

- On my quest to become more open and less judgmental toward others

- When I went to Boston for a weekend and it made me let go of some negativity I've been holding onto for years

- Finally, the second to last post, interview week!

See you guys on Monday =)