Involvement

Now that I’ve opened my eyes and start­ed look­ing around, I’m real­ly amazed at how much there is to be involved in around the Greater Cleve­land area. It makes it hard to choose. I’ve gone to a cou­ple blog­ger mee­tups and they have been quite eye-open­ing in regard to eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment in this area. While I’m still too wet behind the ears in regard to civic action and pol­i­tics, their fer­vor is infec­tive.

And these events might seem to be not much more than mere net­work­ing, but for me on the periph­ery, it seems more promis­ing than that. Next mon­th’s meet­up is with some folks from the pod­cast­ing group and a lady from cleveland.com who wants to talk with blog­gers [undoubtably not blog­gers like me though] about the site.

But wait, there is more than just eco­nom­ic involve­ment! I’ve put in a vol­un­teer appli­ca­tion with Rocky Riv­er Sta­bles’ Ther­a­peu­tic Rid­ing Pro­gram and after I get trained I think that will be an oppor­tu­ni­ty that will be both good for my spir­it as well as help­ful to oth­ers.

Yet I’m con­stant­ly amazed at the lev­el of involve­ment in Tremont. There are so many things going on there that I don’t know which ones to pick. So I think my idea to cre­ate a Tremont spe­cif­ic site to herd all of that info togeth­er is prob­a­bly my best bet. I’ve been tin­ker­ing with a workaround for the free ver­sion of Mov­able­Type­’s 3 weblog lim­it and if I can work that out, nail­ing down a design should be cake­walk and the only drudge work will be dig­ging around for Tremont links and mak­ing lists of busi­ness­es and con­tacts.

That is the rub, I sup­pose. I’m not good at main­tain­ing the nec­es­sary dri­ve to get things done. I need chivvy­ing and con­stant reminders, encour­age­ment and brain­storm­ing to get me start­ed and a dead­line to make me fin­ish. Right now I have a dead­line. The domain reg­is­tra­tion for the domain where I want my Tremont­cen­tric site to live expires on May 7th. So by May 9th I want the site to be live, even if it is just a some­what well-designed linkdump at that point.

This is hard work for me, not doing the work, not want­i­ng to do the work, but dri­ving myself to do it. As of now all of this is still just so much talk. I think it is an improve­ment over how I used to be, and how I saw the same sort of desire for eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment in my old home­town as being fruit­less and fool­ish ide­al­ism. I still don’t think Con­nersville has much hope [although the web­site sure has improved], but Cleve­land can be badass if the right peo­ple get in the right spot and use the right lever­age.

As Archimedes put it:

or, mild­ly para­phrased