I was just sitting here, at 9:49 on a Sunday night, just about to start my weekly blog post, when my phone vibrated. I looked and it was this totally legitimate sounding offer:
Yes, I redacted the link, because I don’t want anyone going to it. But the URL contained both the words “pillage” and “contempt”–not exactly the kind of vocabulary that would inspire confidence in the quality of their intentions.
Who are the people who come up with these scams, anyway? I guess they must get people to click often enough to make it worth their time. And who are those people? The ones who click?? Please, friends: promise me that you won’t click on any link you get in a text from an unknown number. Even if they say they’re your granddaughter and they’re using a friend’s phone to text you because they’re in trouble and they need you to wire them money. Seriously. That didn’t happen.
I’m already planning to have a conversation with a doctor’s office I got a text from the other day, because it was just a plain text message with no identifying information, just saying “click here to confirm your appointment” and then giving a link…still with no identifying information. I knew my doctor was going to be referring me to a different office, but I’m not gonna just click on a link when they don’t even have the name of the office in the text anywhere. I did Google the phone number it came from, which looked like a legit office in my area, but I still didn’t click on the link–I called them instead to confirm my appointment.
Anyway, I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty confident in my skills to identify a scam text/email. I’m pretty confident in a lot of areas of my life, actually. But there are definitely areas I want to improve. And, as I mentioned in my last post, health is high on that list (hence the doctor appointments). But not just the typical “health” that most people think of, though that’s in there too. Here’s a list of some of the areas of my health that I’m planning to improve in the next year:
- physical
- nutritional
- mental
- emotional
- relational
- financial
- environmental
- vocational
- …?
I first had the idea to do something like this quite a while ago, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it, but here I am, over a year later, and I haven’t really gotten started with it. So, that’s what I’m doing for myself this year. I’m going to get better in all the ways I want to. Or at least I’m going to try. And, I don’t know if you noticed, but all of the kinds of health I’ve listed so far have the same suffix. That was intentional–when I started making a list of all the different kinds of “health” I could think of that I wanted to improve, most of them ended in “-al”, so I made the decision to only choose words that do, so I could come up with a name for my project–probably a two-word name with the first word starting with A and the second with L. I know, this is all super cheesy, but I wanted to name it something that captures the feeling I want to get out of it, and the best thing I’ve come up that incorporates the A and the L is “Ardent Living Project”.
I’m not totally sold on it as the name of my project, but it’ll do for now. And I feel like it’s better than, like, the “Abysmal Lemon Project”, or the “Aggravated Lecturer Project”. And I do think it gives an idea of what I want my project to be–I want to feel like I’m really getting out there and eagerly living instead of just letting life pass by, and after almost two years of a pandemic, when I haven’t traveled anywhere, or done a lot of things that I normally would do, that feeling is stronger than it’s ever been. If you have any better ideas of what to call it, please comment and let me know! I’m sure I’ll add to the list of kinds of health, too, so also let me know if you have ideas of other areas I (or others) might want to work on. And please join me–I’d love to have some accountability partners! 🙂
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