half man, half inappropriate

Day Five: Six things you wish you’d never done.

1. I wish I didn’t spend all that time in my youth playing video games.  Only God knows how many hours I spent on Mortal Kombat 3 seeing all the fatalities and animalities, Twisted Metal 2 “enhancing” the game with a GameShark, Final Fantasy VII just playing it, etc.  That time could have been spent socializing with people and not being awkward/inappropriate.
2. I wish I didn’t learn HTML as my first “programming language.”  I got on the C++ game late.  Hell, if I were gonna totally isolate myself from the outside world to be in front of cathode ray tubes all day, I should have at least spent it honing my l33t pr0gr4mm1n6 sk1llz.
3. I wish I didn’t stop drawing in my early teens.  I could have been developing my illustration style and churning out more comic strips.  I’m still capable of drawing, I just wonder how far my skills could have gone if I spent more time doing so.
4. I wish I didn’t wait so long to try stand-up.  This is clearly one of my favorite art forms (rapping is a close second).  And it’s the most challenging art form of all.  I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out what’s funny and what isn’t, but I’ve only spent a very small fraction of my life expressing what I think is funny with a microphone on stage.
5. I wish I didn’t stop b-boying.  I always liked dancing like those cool mofuggas on music videos on MTV when MTV still played music videos.  I guess I stopped when I realized the difficulty of power moves.  Plus, I wasn’t really all that flexible enough to keep my legs straight for windmills.  I never really liked physical exertion.
6. I wish I didn’t spend the first two or three years of my teens being figuratively emo.  There were lots of good times which could have been improved if I just manned the f*ck up.  Man, I was an angry-ass kid at the turn of the millennium.

To be perfectly honest, I believe that if I didn’t do the things I did, then I wouldn’t be the person I am today.  And I like the person I am today; I like where I’m at in life.  I like my own challenges and struggles, so I don’t really take these “six things I wish I’d never done” that seriously.