What is Sundrious?
I’ve always admired people who were masters of a craft and dedicated their time and energy into singular endeavors. To be honest, that admiration has festered into a sort of jealousy and low self-esteem for much of my life. While I’m old enough to remember time before the internet, I suppose I’m a product of a world with social media — where brilliance and determination in all its forms (even if some aren’t obviously brilliant) bubble to the surface and are seemingly everywhere and like many people, I can’t help but compare.
Dozens, if not hundreds of creative pursuits, physical explorations, intellectual curiosities, and potential hobbies are piled up on my back burner. I’ve dabbled in a lot of them, but rarely to a degree where I have much to show for it. One area I’ve explored the most is web design. I haven’t done it so much for myself. It’s been a source of employment for me at times and so I’m forced into it in order to pay bills (or buy another domain name that will never become a website). It does scratch that creative itch for me, though. I’ve tried making websites for myself — creating something dedicated to one of the myriad of subjects I care about – heraldry, politics, rugby for starters — but I’ve shuttered most projects before they ever really got started because I never had a sufficient amount of content, or the free time (or attention span) to expand upon it in great depth before being tantalized by something else. Or I felt like what I had created was not good enough to share.
Sundrious is more than a website – it’s an exercise. Or I hope it will become an exercise. I suppose for now, let’s call it an experiment. No longer will I be swimming against the current trying to change something about myself that may never change, and committing myself to a single topic. I will embrace this reality of mine. This website is where I will wear my heart and my brain on my sleeve. It will be raw, disjointed, and eclectic. Instead of throwing out unpolished ideas, unread/unwritten articles, tentative schemes, incomplete projects, and half-digested arts — I’m going to collect them here no matter how tangential they may feel nor how unqualified I may be on the topic — and I will hope that in aggregate they grow into something new that I can be proud of. I suppose Sundrious is my new compost bucket.
No, what is “Sundrious“?
When I started thinking about what this project might be, how to describe it, and what name I should choose, most of what I came up with had some negative connotations. This would not be called my Portfolio of Failures. I didn’t want to refer to this approach to life of mine as a Quirk. Self-deprecating humor, while sometimes fun, is not what I’m going for here. Even words like dabbling or unfinished sometimes feel insincerely humble or shamefully inadequate.
On the flip side, I want to avoid overcommitting myself, or overselling to you. I’m setting no rules for myself, other than to try and keep it up — whatever it is. This project will not likely be scholarly. Calling what I do art or a craft feels disrespectful to those who’ve put the time in. I may curate and share the intellectual, artistic, and adventurous feats of others, but I’m probably not going to expand on them with any journalistic scrutiny or dazzling adaptations.
I am tickled by the close proximity in sound between human being and human bean. I get a little kick out of how my partner finds it strange when I truncate the word avocado to cado. She particularly disapproves of when I express the cost of something in the currency doll-hairs. I also used to refer to my Toyota Tacoma as the Taco. I don’t always shorten words. Sometimes I make them longer. I’ve always found a sort of humor in how words sound — at least since middle school when a friend and I discovered how fun it was for us to firmly enunciate the word bug. For some reason we were in stitches a whole half hour, saying bug over and over. At any rate, I enjoy words and playing with them.
So I’ve made one up.
Sundrious (ˈsʌn.dri.əs) adjective.
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Marked by a collection of diverse or miscellaneous elements; exhibiting an eclectic variety that blends the distinct and the unexpected into a unified whole.
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Characterized by an omnivorous curiosity that delights in learning without claiming mastery; embracing intellectual exploration with an open mind and a reverence for the vastness of human knowledge.
This website … is sundrious. It is not necessarily a personal blog or diary. In fact this opening salvo is probably the most personal I will get here in terms of sharing about my life. However the entire project is deeply personal in another way. It is where I will collect, share, sometimes comment about, and occasionally expand upon anything and everything that I find fascinating, beautiful, or thought provoking. I’ve set no boundaries or expectations other than that I will strive to be my honest self, embracing the ambiguity and diversity of interests while remaining content or satisfied with only flirting with them. I want a creative outlet to share my meanderings, curiosities, experiments, and adventures that honors them instead of degrades them. It’s my hope this represents a turning point in or a debut of an attitude about myself or perspective of my life.
A quote from “Song of Myself,” a poem by Walt Whitman has been in my Instagram bio a while to serve as a reminder of my aspirations. I’ve been meaning to get it printed and hung somewhere I see it more often, but that’s on the back burner too. It captures the spirit of ambitions for Sundrious.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. ~W.W.
