birdcage [personal]

With every second that ticks by, I feel like I’m disintegrating into the pages of a story that will never be bound, but rather left to fade with time, lining the bottom of a birdcage.

I will blog every day of 2019, I tell myself, a New Years resolution. Every day I’ll write a little something – nothing crazy, 200-300 words – and I’ll make sure to document it on my brand new blog.

It’s already January 2nd and I failed.

Day one.

Fail.

Why must I have such grandiose ideas about what the new year will bring? It’s not a magical time of the year when the veil thins and our willpower to succeed is suddenly heightened. It’s like any other day … filled with appointments, late dinners, dirty clothes, and if we’re lucky, a fresh pink gin.

If we wait until the new year to implement lifestyle changes, do we really care about them? Wouldn’t we start reading more as soon as the idea strikes rather than on some arbitrary date? Saying you’ll start that diet bright and early tomorrow is already setting you up to fail. If you were mentally ready for the change, you would start your new diet that second, not tomorrow, not after vacation, not when life “calms down.”

There are dear-sweet-god moments that motivate us: seeing a friend succeed, watching a loved one die, suddenly noticing the passing of time when your three-year-old scoffs and insists that growing up takes forever. They kick us and get us moving. Dates are not dear-sweet-god moments.

So what’s a resolution I will stick to?

There isn’t one.

I don’t want timers and schedules telling me that I’m a failure when I skip a day or life becomes too hectic. I don’t want to feel boxed and caged and unable to change my goal without feeling like I’m cheating.

So my resolution is simply to not regret wasted time in 2019.

My kids are older (off the breast and out of diapers) so I feel oxygen rejuvenating my pores again. I can stretch. I can leave. I can start to remember who I was before my son was born seven years ago.

I wrote last night – 800 or so words for Unhitched. Considering I haven’t written anything for Unhitched in two months, that’s not too bad.

Charm City is still stalled at 110k words, but hey, those 110k words are pretty choice as far as I’m concerned.

Yesterday wasn’t a waste. I wrote. I figured out how to make a cool new gallery on WordPress. I recategorized all my blog posts. I started reading a book. I made a few friends laugh when I ranted about my failed eBay purchase.

Today wasn’t a waste either. I blogged, damn it. I taught my son what The Great Wall of China is. I composted eight pounds of chocolate (okay, that was sort of a waste).

Do you know what a dimber–damber is? It refers to a clever rogue who excels his fellows or, I guess, the chief of a gang. As an adjective it means very pretty.

I learned that today.

I also learned that damber is the album name for California punk band dimber (pronounced like the switch). Their music is not my cup of tea, but boy howdy check out their website. Seeing a Spotify link in that mess almost ripped open a wormhole back to 1996.

I want to write.

I want to read.

I want to feel like a human, but not just the parts of a human that feel the guilt and pain and depression of not living to its full potential.

I want to check off boxes, send my friends gifts, and find a vintage egg cup to eat breakfast out of (a real egg cup this time).

I want porn back on Tumblr, but that’s not happening, so I will settle for spending less time on social media and more time on drabbles and reading obscure dictionaries.

I’m not going to finish Unhitched this year – I may not even finish Charm City – but I refuse to think of the time I do spend on fanfiction as a waste.

Happy January 2nd.

My Current Fixations

Pexels – a site for high-quality royalty-free stock images. I use these in photo manipulation and for blogs. I’m also going to start a visual inspiration log, similar to the gallery I’ve already set up here. Probably with drabbles attached in the captions.

Phrontistery – A dictionary for rare or unusual words. This is not where I found dimber-damber. That was actually on my new Grandiloquent Word-of-the-day calendar from Kickstarter.