on becoming a better person
Last week also marked the end of the Hundred Days project, and there was a gig to celebrate, as part of the London Word Festival.
It was a pretty good gig: three female comedians and a band, with an accompanying exhibition, The Museum of A Hundred Days. Event organiser Josie Long was pretty funny, although she was heckled by a nine-year old who got more laughs. Isy Suttie's witty and biting songs were great, but unfortunately I found Sara Pascoe's piece felt interminably long and not very funny, so I was glad when The Pictish Trail came on and regaled us with his 30-second songs. He was pretty funny, too, although most of his songs felt like the beginnings of better things. Hopefully he'll develop some of them into longer songs, as they were all pretty good (even the Birds one that he was so disparaging about), and it was nice to see Adem pop in for some percussive support (he can make anything into an instrument; it's awesome. I've never forgotten the time I saw him play a xylophone with two violin bows).
For various reasons, I sort of dropped the ball on my own #100days project (to make something creative every day), at least as far as doing it on a daily basis for the set time period, or for posting about them under the #100days umbrella, so I didn't actively participate to be included in the exhibition. As it turns out, I was included in the exhibition after all and here's a bad photo to prove it (the room was dimly lit, making good photos difficult).
I don't feel like a failure for not having done what I said I would do on a daily basis, though, because I think I made the right decision not to do so. I signed up because I thought it would be fun and make me feel better, especially during the dark days of winter, but the days when I lacked a creative impulse made me feel guilty, and that didn't make me feel like a better person at all. Sometimes it's better to know when to quit something, because it gives you the space to start something else, which is what I did.
Despite what I said last year about new year's resolutions, this year I decided to give the Uberlist another go, and I've been doing pretty well with it. I got the idea from Kelly Sue years ago, but hadn't made one for a few years. This year's list is a combination of Important Things I Need To Get Done, lots places I've been meaning to visit for ages, and random ideas that struck me as a good idea at the time. It's a long list.
Usually an uberlist is 100 items plus an extra one for each year (so next year's will be 111), but in a moment of enthusiasm my list has 210 Things To Do In 2010. This isn't as wildly optimistic as it sounds, because I've sort of cheated on the numbers (for example, instead of one item that says "go to the cinema once a month" I've got an individual item for each month), especially as some of the items were really simple things that were hanging over from my basic to-do list at the end of last year.
Since it's such a long list, though, I'm not going to post the whole thing here (unless anyone really wants me to) but I might post progress reports as the year goes by. Which is kind of where we came in. I may not have completed a project to Make Me A Better Person under the #100days umbrella, but I've been Getting Things Done on my uberlist (over 10% done already), and it's more-or-less taken place in the same time frame, so I feel like I've earned the certificate they gave me at last week's gig. And there's a space on the certificate for me to write in, so maybe that's what I will write.
The exhibition was pretty good, too. Seeing all the work other people had done was quite inspiring, and I managed to come away with some swag, apart from my certificate: two of Daniel Weir's lego creations, a badge from Edward Ross, a story from Gemma Seltzer, and a trangam from Chrissy Williams, who gets the final word in this post:
"Small things accumulate into big things. This means that small things matter. What do you want to do today? Can you make time to do something small, or will you do nothing?"
