![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
How to be a Rock Star
Feb. 20th, 2006 12:30 pmThis morning I realized something simple but profoundly interesting that I'd learned during the past year.
I used to and still do have this thing where I can be very iconic and easily motivated by having the right icons around me. For instance, I could just as easily work on animation on a simple pegbar taped to a light box, but having an animation desk makes me _feel_ like an animator. I'd know this for a while, but today I sorta broadened and generalized it.
The way to be a rock star is to dress like one every day. Now I'm not saying guitar practice isn't important, or knowing how to sing, or that you should wear silk shirts while working on your car. What I mean is... Well. Like me, for instance. A few years ago, I was coming home from work, throwing on stained sweatpants and a baggy tee-shirt and being 'comfortable'. This put some weird pressure on me to be more 'respectable' at work and dress much older than I am. I became the sweatpants and the pants suit. I could still throw on my director's hat and be a 'director' or sit down at my animation desk and be an 'animator' but when I took those off and stepped away from that space, I was the sweatpants.
There's nothing wrong with being the sweatpants, if that's what you want to be. It just isn't what I aspire to.
I used to be the sort that would buy wild outfits that I would theorhetically wear to some theorhetical wild party in the future that never came. Or when the opportunity did arise, I'd be too shy to actually wear the outfit I'd chosen for it or it was out of date or I'd gained or lost weight and it didn't fit. That doesn't mean that I'm wearing a vinyl minidress right now. It just means that I'm not wearing the sweat pants. There's plenty of comfortable stuff that's more expressive of who I am or want to be. Just wearing that instead of the schlub-wear.
Of course, like learning a rock star needs to learn to play guitar, simply dressing different won't make me something I'm not. It just helps me stay in the right frame of mind.
I used to and still do have this thing where I can be very iconic and easily motivated by having the right icons around me. For instance, I could just as easily work on animation on a simple pegbar taped to a light box, but having an animation desk makes me _feel_ like an animator. I'd know this for a while, but today I sorta broadened and generalized it.
The way to be a rock star is to dress like one every day. Now I'm not saying guitar practice isn't important, or knowing how to sing, or that you should wear silk shirts while working on your car. What I mean is... Well. Like me, for instance. A few years ago, I was coming home from work, throwing on stained sweatpants and a baggy tee-shirt and being 'comfortable'. This put some weird pressure on me to be more 'respectable' at work and dress much older than I am. I became the sweatpants and the pants suit. I could still throw on my director's hat and be a 'director' or sit down at my animation desk and be an 'animator' but when I took those off and stepped away from that space, I was the sweatpants.
There's nothing wrong with being the sweatpants, if that's what you want to be. It just isn't what I aspire to.
I used to be the sort that would buy wild outfits that I would theorhetically wear to some theorhetical wild party in the future that never came. Or when the opportunity did arise, I'd be too shy to actually wear the outfit I'd chosen for it or it was out of date or I'd gained or lost weight and it didn't fit. That doesn't mean that I'm wearing a vinyl minidress right now. It just means that I'm not wearing the sweat pants. There's plenty of comfortable stuff that's more expressive of who I am or want to be. Just wearing that instead of the schlub-wear.
Of course, like learning a rock star needs to learn to play guitar, simply dressing different won't make me something I'm not. It just helps me stay in the right frame of mind.
