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Strike a match.
Challenge #5
Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
The incidental moments and long-term effects have me as the beneficiary of so many things. For example: I start watching the show House back in college, and find a group of people to talk to about it. In that group, I make new friends, and among those friends, there's someone enthusiastic about getting into exercising. I follow her lead, I start working out, and I'm still going to the gym and enjoying myself while I do so. I might've gotten into it at some point eventually, and that's the specific encounter I can point to that got me doing it when I did.
Fandom's brought me to bands I couldn't imagine a life without. A fanmix here, a fanvid there, introducing me to singers whose voices fill my heart and make me want to create something to bring on that same feeling into someone else. Someone mentions watching a movie and I want to be part of the conversation, so I buy a movie ticket, and almost immediately I'm flying across the country to share a hotel room with people who've got faces I've never seen until that night. I ask for a book recommendation and I'm reading words that take the top of my head off. I try new foods, I buy silly hats, I correctly answer questions in class. I already know what the teacher's talking about and don't have the heart to tell my boss where I learned that one particular trivia nugget.
I learn by doing - by committing to ideas longer than anything I've done before, to emotions I've never tried to reach. I fail and try and fail again and keep trying and I'm able to do it better because of fandom's influence. I aim to impress the people I know and the people I've never met and the people who've left my life that I still think on fondly because of where I was and who they used to be. I'm able to improve because I keep my standards high, and I'm able to keep my standards high because of everyone else around me. I think if they can do it, I can do it, too; I think it's worth a shot that I wouldn't know how to shoot if I hadn't been in fandom for a while. I want to live up to the example people set - both the one in reality and the one I've made up in my head - and push myself to improve to get there.
My sense of ethical behavior is improved markedly by seeing negative examples and finding out there's a kind of person I don't want to be.
Basically, everything.
Even with all the shit I've seen go down, it's been a remarkably positive experience.
Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
The incidental moments and long-term effects have me as the beneficiary of so many things. For example: I start watching the show House back in college, and find a group of people to talk to about it. In that group, I make new friends, and among those friends, there's someone enthusiastic about getting into exercising. I follow her lead, I start working out, and I'm still going to the gym and enjoying myself while I do so. I might've gotten into it at some point eventually, and that's the specific encounter I can point to that got me doing it when I did.
Fandom's brought me to bands I couldn't imagine a life without. A fanmix here, a fanvid there, introducing me to singers whose voices fill my heart and make me want to create something to bring on that same feeling into someone else. Someone mentions watching a movie and I want to be part of the conversation, so I buy a movie ticket, and almost immediately I'm flying across the country to share a hotel room with people who've got faces I've never seen until that night. I ask for a book recommendation and I'm reading words that take the top of my head off. I try new foods, I buy silly hats, I correctly answer questions in class. I already know what the teacher's talking about and don't have the heart to tell my boss where I learned that one particular trivia nugget.
I learn by doing - by committing to ideas longer than anything I've done before, to emotions I've never tried to reach. I fail and try and fail again and keep trying and I'm able to do it better because of fandom's influence. I aim to impress the people I know and the people I've never met and the people who've left my life that I still think on fondly because of where I was and who they used to be. I'm able to improve because I keep my standards high, and I'm able to keep my standards high because of everyone else around me. I think if they can do it, I can do it, too; I think it's worth a shot that I wouldn't know how to shoot if I hadn't been in fandom for a while. I want to live up to the example people set - both the one in reality and the one I've made up in my head - and push myself to improve to get there.
My sense of ethical behavior is improved markedly by seeing negative examples and finding out there's a kind of person I don't want to be.
Basically, everything.
Even with all the shit I've seen go down, it's been a remarkably positive experience.