Defining Characteristics Of That Which Defies Definition...

WHO I AM (Part 1 of an infinite series)

As of this writing I am (still) a procrastinator. It's one of my worst failings. Give me something to do and if I am not specifically instructed to do it right away, then it'll get done...eventually.
This burned me back in grade five. I turned in a project four days late, and got 98% on it...minus twenty percent for each day I'd missed. Thereafter, essays and assignments from school were exempt from my prevailing "leave it alone and maybe it will do itself" attitude.
Procrastination is something I would choose to change, if I knew any alternative. It sounds simple, really: just do whatever it is you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it. It's not so easy when you live primarily in a mind that refuses to stay still for any length of time.
Anyway:
My two passions are music and the written word. I see them as related, kissing cousins perhaps. If you can't say it in words, say it with music...then describe the music and you'll have come full circle.
Music was a big part of my life before I could read more than my own name. I was composing at four and have now written enough music for at least a couple of albums. Three things hold me back from pursuing a career: one, I have no idea what to do with the stuff I've written; two, I've convinced myself the kind of music I write--mostly New-Agey soundscapes--has no real market; three, I have this fear of rejection. (You can probably say the first two objections are merely different ways of stating the third.)
You know that saying "the only failure is a lack of effort"? Oh, I can spout that until my face turns blue, but I don't seem to grasp that it applies here. After all, what's failure when you haven't tasted success? I'm still a musician.
I only have formal piano schooling to grade six, thanks to two other traits of mine: I bore easily and I insist on my own way of doing things. I was forever noodling around with my assigned pieces, trying to make them my own. And I swiftly grew to hate my piano teacher's insistence that I use certain fingers to play certain notes. It may have been the correct fingering, but it didn't feel right to me. My wife has often demanded, exasperation apparent in her voice, why I absolutely have to do things the hard way. The answer is obvious: the easy way is usually harder for me.
I started stringing words rather than notes together in grade two. I still remember my first lengthy work: a painfully derivative piece of tripe called "Dressed to Kill" in which, despite the title, fashion was never mentioned and nobody...quite... died. I did, however, fill up an entire notebook with this story, and it did have a coherent, if predictable, plot. The work won me acclaim that didn't sit well with me then and still doesn't. It was a story, right? We've all heard stories since earliest childhood, right? There was nothing to it: I simply transcribed what I was thinking.
I still do it that way. I've never written an outline and I shun "rough copies" like the plague and I'm completely bewildered by the reaction this gets.
I had one teacher who point-blank refused to accept an essay I submitted because I had not attached a draft. After a great deal of argument--why the hell would I want to write something twice?--she took my paper and then asked me to rewrite it over lunch hour. I handed her a near-verbatim copy and stormed out of the room. (I was one for storming out of classrooms when things didn't go my way...ask my friend Jen.)
With some pride, I can say that was one educational battle I won. I never wrote another draft. Writing, for me at least, is a simple process of self-examination. I'll stop briefly in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph, as I'm doing right now, to wait for the next words to fall out of my mind, and then I'll pick them up and set them in order on the page and move on.
I've been told I am a writer of modest talent. Again, though, as with musicianship, I have no idea what to do with the ability I have. They never bother to teach this sort of thing in school.
So now I write for me...to get emotions out, to try to resolve a confused brain, and most of all to push my views (which has been called, charitably, rather odd) out in to the world. Hey, folks, it's an odd world. Us oddballs are normal. It's you squares that are weird.