I was 10 years old in 2002, and I began a “comic book company” that me and my buddy Max called Smiley Face Inc. The project lasted less than a week; apparently, we weren’t allowed to “sell things” to other fourth graders.
In 2009, I told my mom I was going to be vegan. By the time she ordered Pizza Hut that weekend, that ship had sailed.
And in 2010, I saved $1100 for a 149cc gas-powered Chinese scooter, presumably a Honda knockoff. I put a few hundred miles on it but was wary of commuting on it since I never actually got around to obtaining the proper license.
Also in 2010, I began pursuing a degree in music. I had dreams of becoming America’s next great jazz saxophonist (if such a thing is even still obtainable). Three semesters later, I was on academic probation. (To be fair, 11 years later I completed a Master's in Sociology though).
In 2012, I showed up to practice for my buddy’s band, Bigger than War. The three-piece punk band, comprised of 19-year-olds with big the-band’s-gonna-make-it energy thought that a stoned tenor sax player with an admittedly shaky work ethic would be a good fit. It was not.
In 2013, I was offered the opportunity of a lifetime: a friend wanted to pay for me to hike the Appalachian Trail with him. I got bored and homesick about a quarter of the way through (500 miles though), hitchhiked to a music festival, then made my way back home.
In 2014, I got into gardening and poured hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars (lul I was making minimum wage) into a nonprofit that never took off (shoutout to the Backyard Agriculture Network homies!).
In 2019, as part of a Master’s degree program, I wrote the first half of my thesis. I intended to study community garden participants, eventually hoping to create some kind of written record that could advocate for the promotion of more food-growing spaces.
In 2020, I purchased a decent gaming PC, with the hopes of growing an audience and community through video gaming (we’re still over there, occasionally though!)
In those peak-COVID fear days (not that there weren’t days after this that I, personally, was anxious about the spread of the pandemic. Rather, I’m thinking about some point in time when COVID was at the height of its hold over the public consciousness), I started an indoor plant retailer with my soon-to-be-baby-mama. We sold the plants through Instagram DMs and had big brick-and-mortar dreams. We even got the home nursery permits and LLC status to prove it. We seemed to take all the right steps and, well, at this point, all I’ve got to show for it is a struggling Zamioculcas zamiifolia and some unanswered LegalZoom emails.
In 2021, I recorded five hours of a podcast I hoped to release. But my hard drive crashed before I finished editing and publishing the episodes, and I lost everything related to that project.
Now it’s March of 2022, and I wrote the above timeline of half-baked, well-intentioned starts that I never saw through to the end. Earlier in that same March day, in a caffeine-induced fervor, I thought the idea of some kind of newsletter/blog/podcast thing was a creative outlet I could sink my teeth into.
All this to say: am I inviting doom on this project by publishing a list of half-finished projects as entry number one? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Time will let me know. I haven’t written routinely since I finished my college coursework a couple of years ago. That writing was immensely focused and confined to the parameters of academia. This project, as I envision it in its primordial stages, is something a bit different. Regardless of the outcome, whether this project lasts another two entries or is part of some longer-term personal growth event, I’ll be happy to have a record of how I was feeling at this point in my life. I mean, just a few months ago, I found episode one of a completely nonsensical vlog episode I posted on YouTube nearly 15 years ago. It was the first, and only, of a “new project.”
Is there a world where I look back on this write-up with similar cringe levels? Honestly, it seems unlikely I could top this high school sophomore on that front. Just in case, I’ll go ahead and do a quick, “Siri, add an all-day event to my calendar for April 1, 2037, called ‘go read your first post on Oversharing.’”
What can readers expect, then? Frankly, I’m cautious about publicly documenting the Vision Board for this project. After all, it’s been just 8 hours since I even considered the idea of documenting myself in this way. I guess there’s a long list of essay prompts and opinion pieces floating in my head that might make for some interesting reads. And there are life-changing events in my immediate future that might require (and be positively affected by) introspection and sharing. And there are stories that, as I recall them, are absolutely unbelievable and seem to get a laugh whenever they are told at a house party.
And maybe you’ll enjoy these musings, too. Thanks for letting me overshare with you.
Alex D Francisco
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