SlateI’m spending the week in Jackson, Mississippi, visiting my boyfriend. Darren is a graphic designer and one of my sister’s best friends from Loyola University, New Orleans. If you’re wondering how we met, we hit it off in February at Mardi Gras. Nothing spells romance like applying eyeliner to a pirate in a pink bandana while he whines, “Agggh! It feels like you’re drawing on my eyeball!”

One of my priorities for this visit — besides consuming all the buttery delicacies that the south has to offer — is for Darren to help me revamp the Reschool Yourself site. Lucky for me, he can understand language like, “The objective of the WP-SuperCache is to make the site static and not run any PHP” — yet has never memorized pi to the 100th digit, or attended a Star Wars-themed wedding.

As tech savvy as Darren is, he struggled to add features and rework the blog design so it matched up with my ideals. (* See below for a possible explanation for this.) Today we had this conversation about the site:

Darren: I want to start from scratch and rebuild it intentionally…

Me: Rather than wasting time trying to fix all the imperfections.

Darren: Yes!

Me: Like what I want to do with myself.

Instead of adding Item #576 to the mental list of “Ways to Improve Myself” — when I haven’t yet crossed off Item #15: Write to grandparents once a week, or Item #211: Meditate 10 minutes per day — I’ve decided to stop chipping away fruitlessly at “the Beta version” of myself and start fresh with version 2.0. As with my website, I’ll feel relieved to start with a clean slate and add features intentionally, exactly the way I want them, instead of cleaning up messes from the past. Here are a few examples of what I hope to do:

  • Take down the photos and posters covering the walls of my childhood bedroom. It was about time that the Kim Anderson photos, the Pulp Fiction and Friends posters, and the Ethan Hawke shrine found a new home in the local thrift store. (Completed 7/27/08. Hope to finish a blog post about the experience of getting a big-girl room at age 28.)
    • Version 2.0: Pick a grown-up color and paint.
  • Archive old Gmails (current count: 10,262) and unsubscribe to listserves that I last read in 2004.
    • Version 2.0: Categorize or delete any new emails that hit my inbox.
  • Instead of promising myself that I’ll go back through years of bank statements and balance my checkbook, close my bank account and open a fresh one. Suze Orman would be so proud.
    • Version 2.0: Keep a monthly budget and be aware of every transaction.

I hope that as the Reschool Yourself site becomes more advanced and efficient, I will be, too. And, dare I hope, more attractive?

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* Possible reason for the blog design’s shortcomings: The current theme is credited to Robbie Williams, star of the British pop band Take That. The WordPress byline links to an “I Heart RW” site that describes Robbie as “roguishly handsome where his bandmates were merely cute.” Maybe if Robbie spent more time on programming than in rehab, his designs (or rather, those of the obsessive Polish programmer who claims his name as an alias) might be a little higher functioning.

Flickr Creative Commons image courtesy of PinkMoose.

This post is part of the series “Why Reschool?”

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