Blogging – Posting Challenge, Day 12

(Also be sure to follow along with Tina, Jean, Krista, and Tambo as they say much more sane and less esoteric things than me!)

I can't recall my first exposure to blogging. It was back when the net was new; back when LiveJournal was just starting out and hadn't been sold to companies who decided liberally sprinkling the pages with ads was somehow a good idea. I had wanted to keep a diary for a long time, but frankly, I suck at diaries. I'm one of those people that purchases them, keeps a day or two, then relegates them to the back of the bookshelf so I don't have to feel guilty every time I run across the empty pages. I thought maybe having people looking in on my work would help my determination to keep up with it, so I made my first journal.

Like all journals of young people, there was much emotion and angst, to the point I don't know how I ever got followers. But I managed with well over 100, which was a pretty respectable following in the early days of the net. It helped my memory, my emotional equilibrium, and my life in general. But at some point I befriended one too many of my flakier followers. I screamed one too many times where a boyfriend or girlfriend could see it. And the drama bomb exploded once too often in my lap.

So I abandoned it.

About the point I felt I could take it back up again, LJ had added advertisements, and it just didn't feel like the same place anymore. I already paid for my account, I did my part to support LJ for years, and saw no reason why I should be punished when times were lean. Especially when I knew (as everyone there did) that they weren't exactly hurting for money. I'd be there right now, but what's the point? I thought I'd give a different blog site a try instead.

I've since thought of taking it up again, as practice to getting back into daily writing. So far the "daily" part is an uphill battle, but at least the "writing" is happening. I am woefully behind, but I haven't given up.

Short Term Goals - Posting Challenge, Day 8

(Also be sure to follow along with Tina, Jean, Krista, and Tambo as they say much more sane and less esoteric things than me!)

Today I need to post short term goals for the month. Aside from my determination to catch up and ultimately complete this challenge, I have none. I have many long term goals, such as "find a job," "move to Australia," "meet my boyfriend," "save some money," and "have a(nother) kid." Long term goals I have out the wazoo.

Even the reason for doing this blog--"write more, and better"--is a long term goal.

Perhaps I should make one. How about "meditate daily?"

I always felt my best, my most balanced when I meditated at least once a day, and I did it for a long time. But then...I got busy. I got depressed. I became disillusioned. Time, and life, started slipping away from me, and I was too sad and too despondent to get it back. So I slid into the realm writers and would-be writers know so well, the "I'll do it when I don't have 20 more important things on my plate."

Which, of course, is code for "never, but thinking I will makes me feel better about it."

Today is the 14th--the 15th, technically, but I haven't slept yet. My personal reality holds that the day doesn't end until I go comatose. I am backdating posts, catching up from my flight and subsequent post-flight rush to take care of everything else I'd neglected.

I can't meditate tonight, if I do, I'll fall asleep. No, seriously, I'm exhausted, only the desire to write between 3-5 blog posts so I can catch up is keeping my fingers to the keyboard. It's good practice for getting back into the habit of using stubbor determination when inspiration is low. But honestly, all tendencies to procrastinate aside, I have had one of two results happen when I meditate tired. The first is I fall asleep, nulling any good it might have done. The second is I jazz up, causing a sleepless night and possibly a sleepy next day.

I get little enough sleep as it is, thanks.

So, tomorrow. If you don't see some sort of note dropped on the 15th, someone yell at me, please. I offer myself up to the shame game.

Thanks.

I'll try to drop at least one note about it each day until the end of the month, and I'll try to do so in a way that bores no one. Because, dude, who really wants to hear about my visualization where I climb through the guts of a giant snake until I exit the mouth to find myself on a field of clouds facing a man who will fly me off to strange and odd places, amIright? Boring!

When Practicality IS the Dream

It’s two weeks until Christmas and my blog is snowing. No, seriously, there is a snow GIF on my blog. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’ll all melt off by January 4th–about the time that, I am told, snow will fall for real in my neck of the woods. Maybe by then I’ll have a job, so I can buy snow boots. Otherwise I’ll have to trust to thick socks and flimsy cloth sneakers.

I am looking once again down the barrel of my writing. The strange creatures that haunted the pages of my comics are calling to me again, wanting to give birth to themselves from the corners of my mind.

I’m not sure how I feel about that, either.

In the midst of a crisis of confidence--or perhaps a four-on-the-floor depression, who the hell knows?–I decided my writing was…well…bupkus. Utter, total, and complete bupkus. I was a hack, a wannabe, with all the writing talent of a squid, and I’d be better off investigating a real line of work, like, say, my local 7-11.

So I stopped. Completely.

But the ideas won’t go away. They flirt on the outskirts of my mind; tiny black-winged figures in the distance, soaring over the trees, somewhere between threatening and begging, waiting to be brought screaming to life beneath my typing fingertips. I find no joy in creating them, no joy in the process of making them coherent in the plot-line, and some pain in that they won’t tell me what they’re up to! I only have the vaguest, most frustrating idea.

But there is a perfect beauty to their flight, their menace, the way they can destroy and mutilate lives, then disappear without a trace. There is a terrible wonder in the way they devour others, and something inspirational in the heroes that oppose them, though they barely know what it is they’re up against. There are so many story threads here that I need a chart to map them–brother to sister, brother to friend, sister to friend, friend to friend, friend to lover, lover to lover, lives blown apart by the deepest connections, ties severed and wounds flayed as only the closest of friends can do, now in desperate need of mending before the darkness comes for them all.

And still, I’m writing a blog post instead, putting off the damned struggle of herding and wrestling all these ephemeral cats down onto the paper and pinning them in place, my collection of feral, furry little butterflies. I’m dodging the scratches to my psyche, the claw marks in my hopes and dreams, the little teeth biting viciously through my self confidence and tearing it away in chunks. I avoid the specter of my own failure by failing to try, and while that accomplishes nothing, at least I still hold the dream that I could have succeeded. You know, if I really wanted to.

You ever wonder how it is we can so easily lie to ourselves, even when we know what we’re doing is a lie?

These days I sometimes wonder if that’s all any of it is, a lie. I will never get a job or unemployment, but run out of money and be kicked out of my home. I will lose everything I own and roam the streets begging for a little compassion from a cash-strapped and increasingly hostile country, hoping not to be raped or murdered by people who see how vulnerable I am. I will never go overseas to meet my one true love, but break his heart and my own with false promises I can never keep. I will never see my son again. I’ll be seen as a shameful influence and a fuck-up by his parents. And I will never, ever, not in a million years, write my bestselling novel.

So why even try?

Sometimes the answer “because I need to eat and maybe keep warm” is the only one that keeps any of us going. It’s certainly a good enough one for me. So I will try again, for god and country and a desperate need to eat.

And who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky.