Odds & Ends

Hello there, non-existent audience. It’s been a few days and I’m feeling overdue to write something. That note I wrote myself, and wrote about in the last entry, is starting to stare at me and make me feel guilty.

However, inspiration is short tonight. Not for any particular reason except that today’s been fairly busy and I’m slightly burnt out because of it. It’s 9pm and I’m only now having a few minutes free to sit and type this up. So I expect that this will be short and mundane.

How mundane, you ask? Well let me tell you about my day. (How’s that for uninspired?)

Work was nothing special, but although it’s only Tuesday, it’s been, an shaping up to continue being, a busy week. Not extraordinarily so, but enough so that the days go by quickly, enough to keep me from being bored. Oh, except for when the coworker stopped by my desk first thing this morning with a laptop that wouldn’t boot off the hard drive. Five hours of working on it later, I finally gave up and called for the time of death. Her hard drive is toast. I feel bad, because she’s a nice lady, and she’s trying not to stress out about potentially losing all the data on the drive. I say potentially because there is still an outside chance I might be able to recover it. But at the same time, I always tell people at work to save their data on one of the network drives we have for them to do so. You know, the ones that get backed up every night to prevent data loss like this. But if they don’t do it…well, what can I do?

Exciting stuff in the land of IT, don’t you think?

After work, I made it to the gym. I’ve been trying to be better about going the pat few weeks; as much as I hate going, I do realize that this basic concession to health can only help me in the long run. But after a good 15 years or so of going off and on, I have resigned myself to the fact that I clearly do not have whatever gene it is that would allow my to enjoy it. I just find it boring and difficult, not a winning combination.

Arriving home post gym, I immediately enjoyed my post-gym shower. Hot, steaming, just the way I like it, especially in the winter. If I’m not broiled by the time I get out, then it wasn’t hot enough. Next up, dinner. Busy night in the kitchen. Although I was only making chicken and rice, I was making a lot of both as I am the king of leftovers and days worth of food prep at one go. Plus, while neither recipe i particularly difficult, both are involved enough with different types of things going on, that juggling cooking them both at the same time can be a little tricky. The rice needs to be cooked while I’m also sautéing vegetables that will be added to it, and those veggies aren’t going to chop and prep themselves are they? In the meantime, the chicken also needs to be dredged in flour, cooked, then removed from the pan so I can cook the mushrooms that go along with it, then the pan needs to be deglazed with white wine, and the chicken added back in while the wine thickens into a sauce. On the plus side, it’s damn tasty and also works well on a sandwich. And now I have chicken and rice for days. Oh yeah, and add to that I also prepped some additional veggies and spices for a crock pot chicken stew I’m going to throw on before I leave for work tomorrow. One thing is for certain, it’s unlikely I’m going to starve anytime soon.

Finishing dinner, it seemed like a good time to do my taxes. Full disclosure, my taxes every year are incredibly simple and usually only take about an hour. Anyway, that’s also done. Now I’l just be eagerly awaiting my refund that will then be placed immediately into the I Need A New Mattress And Also A Trip To Portugal This Year fund.

And now, here I am. Dutifully writing something as per that bossy note. Not anything that would blow either your doors off or your skirt up, but it’s something. Mission accomplished. Now I’m going to relax with some season two of The Punisher. Because closing out my night with some brutal TV violence seems like the way to go.

Write Something

I wrote myself a note and am, for now, leaving it on my coffee table. It says: Write Something.

A simple enough reminder, but one that I feel like I need in these early stages. I feel like, in some ways, I’m very much a creature of habit, and as my habits currently do not include writing, this reminder will help me to actually do some. Otherwise, the likelihood that I would just forget to keep up with this is actually pretty strong. I’d come home night after night and settle into my normal routine which I would describe for you here, but is so incredibly boring and bland that I’d be ashamed to even put it into words.

OK, fine, it’s: dinner (make, eat, clean up after), Netflix, social media, iPad games, maybe play a little guitar. Basic Bitch 101. What can I say, I have always enjoyed my lazy down time.

So considering I spend a lot of time in my TV room, where the coffee table with said note resides, I see it every time I come in here. And I hope this will be good, I hope. It’s not motivation, or dedication, or inspiration, it’s just a reminder.

Don’t forget.

Don’t put it off.

Netflix and Facebook and Candy Crush will all still be there in fifteen minutes…or half an hour…or an hour.

Write something.

 

Well I’m Back

I’m giving this a shot one more time. Writing. It’s something I’ve tried numerous times before and always seem to fail at. And by fail I mean give up on. I’ve always been a prodigious reader, ever since I was a wee lad; anyone who knows me knows this. And along with that, I’ve always had at least some level of interest in trying to write, and that’s something I’ve been less prodigious at. It’s very possible that I don’t have the correct gene, the correct combination of motivation and dedication to make it happen. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat in front of a computer (or typewriter, way back in the day) staring blankly at a Word document (or piece of paper), trying to make some kind of magic happen. I’ve never been short on ideas for stories I want to try and write, but somewhere between my brain and my fingers it all gets lost. Sometimes in the inability to fully flesh out my thoughts, but  ore often, I think, in my desire to “get it right the first time”. I think that causes my brain to gridlock, and that’s a mindset I need to get myself out of. Embrace mistakes, embrace rewrites!

But let’s not put the cart before the horse. First things first, I have to see if I can get myself back in the habit of writing. If you, imaginary audience, were to scroll down just a few posts in this long neglected blog, you’d see I’ve written a very similar attempt at self motivation something like a half dozen or so years ago. Which was, coincidentally enough, one of the last posts I wrote for this blog.

(Side note: part of me wants to go back and reread my earlier blogging years, but another equally as large part feels like I would just be mortified. It’ll be curious to see which side wins out.)

Where was I?

Oh yes, getting back to writing. Like anything one wishes to get better at, I think this will be an endeavor that will require practice and dedication. Eventually, my end game is to write a book. I don’t care if it’s complete crap, I just want to be able to say that I finished one. (That last statement is of course partly a lie: Of course I care if it’s complete crap, I will be hoping that the crapiness quotient is somewhere below 100%.) But I also realize that if I were to jump right into trying to write a novel, I will fail. I’ll find myself staring at that screen, losing my motivation, and once again eventually just letting it slip away.

So henceforth, I’m back here. To practice. To work out whatever part of my brain musculature that will allow me to see hurdles as challenges to overcome rather than reasons to stop. To write…something, anything. That’s my challenge to myself. To try to write something here on this blog at least a few times a week, no matter what it is, as long as it’s something. To not be afraid that the words I’m putting down aren’t the right ones, because even the wrong words are better than none at all. The wrong words can be corrected, but there’s nothing you can do with nothing.