There is a home video of me when I was about 6 years old that often pops into my head ever since I watched it back several years ago.

It's one of those odd experiences where I actually remember doing it, and now I’m watching that moment back through the eye of the camcorder—it’s a weird kind of emotional stereo, I guess. But it sticks with me because it’s as if a sizable chunk of my personality is condensed into 3 seconds.

I’m making it seem a lot more serious than it is: it’s a video of my two older brothers (around 11 and 13 years old), dressed in denim jackets, sunglasses and spiky-combed-back-with-mousse hair, dancing and singing along to “I’m Fat,” by Weird Al Yankovic. They're having a grand ol’ time, doing their quasi-synchronized, mostly improvised dance, singing, “I’m fat! I’m fat! You know it—you know it” and then comes the moment: little Jeremy, in his Spiderman jammies, can’t resist the fun anymore, so he jumps up off the couch and starts gleefully dancing along! Wee! This is really fun! Dancing, dancing and then ohmygosheveryoneislookingatme and I jump back on the couch and shove my head between the cushions in embarrassment.

This funny little scene has reverberations throughout my little life history. It’s a poignant caricature of all the times, big and small, that I’ve wanted to break out and do something ridiculous or extraordinary or unexpected or drastic, but then coil back because of a lack of courage, or a resurgence of practical thinking, or laziness, or the fear of what others may think. I guess it’s a paradox: I love the idea of new, exciting things, but I recoil at the thought of drawing attention to myself—of being different, which is a characteristic almost any great idea requires. Often, there are perfectly good reasons why I recoil, and I rarely regret it. But sometimes, I think I’m going to go crazy with all these piles of unfinished, unexpressed Good Ideas in my brain.

Speaking of which, there are more ideas in my brain about this very subject, but because I’ve done this same little pattern about a dozen times with this very blog post (“Maybe I should say X or Y, or maybe I should just forget it...”), I’m just going to go ahead and post it now before I bury my head again in the proverbial couch-cushions...

Or am I burying my head by posting it now, unfinished and not fully expressed?