Catching up on what is good

A reflection on blogging, success, failure, and clarity

When I started this blog with a daily challenge, I thought it would be somewhat difficult to keep up with. My life felt very full and hectic and busy. I was starting another semester with my eighty-whatever new best friends, and I have young kids. I always had more than enough to be behind on already. I decided to try the whole daily blog idea in part because I thought it might help me be less of a perfectionist.

Every idea doesn’t have to be amazing. Every word doesn’t have to be ideal. I would write and I would let it go. In my more pessimistic moments, I thought it could be something else to be perpetually failing to do as well as I felt I should.

As it happened, I found daily blogging to be easier and more invigorating than I expected it to be. I liked having a small challenge, an achievable task. Other areas of endeavor that I find myself engaged in simply don’t provide much of an opportunity for completion, let alone success. Teaching, academia, parenting—these are long-haul projects full of endless effort, complexity, and balancing. By giving myself a context in which done was good enough, I was able to taste completion and success regularly. Salutary.

After a brief hiccup of pandemic productivity, I hit a wall and let myself stop. That was the only thing to do, even if it may not have been the right thing.

It was certainly contrary to the spirit of the daily post idea but aligned with me personal reasons for undertaking such a project.

I’ve definitely learned something even if it’s not always clear what.

I’m going to keep at it, in a haphazard way, consistently inconsistent, and I’ll see what happens.

What Day is this?

I know I’m not alone in finding my relationship to time altered in recent days. Or weeks. Or is it months?

This week, I’m trying a new way to mark the days of the week: each day, I’m reading a poem related to that day of the week.

On Sunday, I read Sunday Morning by Bonnie St. Andrews.

That got the song Sunday Morning (Nico with the Velvet Underground) in my head. For the entire day. Which meant that I definitely knew it was Sunday. The problem is that the song is still in my head, and it’s Monday. I’m more or less back where I started.

Planning Does not Equal Panic

I’m a cautious person by inclination, especially when the consequences of the risk are dire. Heard of Covid-19 lately? Even if the risk is low, if people are going to die, I’m not a fan. I have been called pessimistic, and I’m enough of a pessimist that I think acknowledging the possibility of bad outcomes is valuable. If nothing terrible happens, great, and don’t think your smug condescending attitude towards caution is going to sway me. The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a fast-approaching train.

And I’m enough of a rhetoric-adjacent expert to be frustrated by the implication that any show of caution is essentially an unjustified panic.

Sometimes the annoyance of disruption is worth it, and a global pandemic is one of those times.

Meanwhile, stock up on books.

2/100 I’m not a blogger and this is my blog (part II)

Whenever I order a vegan meal at a restaurant or buy a huge cart of only vegan things at Trader Joe’s, someone asks if I’m vegan or just vegetarian. The answer is actually neither. I’m an omnivore who likes vegetables. And tofu. But that is neither here nor there. 

If people often see what I eat and think I must be at least a vegetarian, they discover what I’m interested in, and think I must be at least an occasional blogger. I’m not. Or at least I haven’t been. 

I could blog about far too many interests—I’ve considered everything from gin, curly hair, and mysteries to the English language, higher education, motherhood, and intercultural family life. What that wide range of disparate interests means, in practical terms with regard to a blog, is that I can’t actually blog about any one thing. 

My plan for this 100 post challenge is to explore some of the blog ideas I have entertained in the past. I’ll start with some meta posts and shift into actual experiments. One day I might write about a gin cocktail or a curly hair problem, another I’ll consider a word or idea from some area of my life. To potentially prevent sheer chaos and confusion, I’ll use the framework of exploration, making, and reflection. Along the way, I’ll reflect, and I’ll make changes. Maybe I’ll take up meme-production. It’s more likely than Twitter.