Busywork

It turns out that writing every day is a difficult thing to actually do. While I have been mostly successful, it's a bit of a struggle most nights to convince myself that I do, in fact, need to sit here for at least five minutes and elocute as best I can about some sort of topic coherently. I'm not sure how many of those adjectives and nouns I satisfy every night, but I give it a college try, or at least a post-bac try as best I can. I'm not sure why I've managed to stick with this commitment more successfully than other ones (like running every day or doing my laundry once a week or going to the store on a certain day) - it's no more useful in any real sense. I suppose it ends up being that in some sense I have a blogging partner which is of course you, gentle reader, who like my current nonexistent running partner, waits patiently out in the cold anticipating my arrival so we can share a few minutes together.

Regardless of how true my comparison is, it exists on some level in my mind that is apparently sufficient to draw me over to the keyboard and screen and away from my vaguely comfortable bed where I happy try to spend at least nine hours every night. Mostly I'm close to successful. This past 38 posts have definitely eaten into that time, however, so my feeling of obligation must seem to run pretty deep. This is fairly absurd considering there are only about four of you bothering to read ever (that I know of for sure), although I suppose my belittling your interest isn't really the nicest thing of me to do. See how cranky I get when I'm tired?

I marvel especially at this whole phenomenon considering my utter lack of ability to keep a journal or diary when I was younger, which I attempted here and there on more than one occasion. I never wrote often, and generally hated what I wrote when I looked back at it later. Adolescent angst and whatnot does not make for lucid and flowing prose. I think part of my problem is I never wanted to dwell on the details of my short-term-memory life in such detail as to record them to any degree on a regular basis. I'd like to think I'm avoiding that here, although it is obvious to me, and I'm sure to you, that things have a way of creeping in and either taking over topics or coloring my opinions about things. It's hard to divorce yourself completely from your present life in such a personal and possible form of expressions. I have essentially no boundaries or guidelines beyond levels of decency and my own sense of privacy, which varies from night to night. Clearly today I have little so say of any serious personal nature and I correspondingly feel quite detached from any of the words that I put on the page. This might be my least-edited post ever, and I think you should probably regret it. I don't usually alter much, but here and there I'll change my diction or syntax a little - occasionally I'll delete a sentence or two to refocus a paragraph, to attempt a sense of flow or unity. Tonight I'm just happy to have put in ten minutes by now, enough to leave off and try again tomorrow. I guess we all have to trust in the value of practice.