YEAR

I did it.

One year ago today, I started writing this blog. A year of writing things, every day, no matter what, and this was a year of many, many, many Whats.

I didn't have any plan at all when I started, didn't even really have the goal to write each day without fail until a couple weeks in, I think, didn't have any real idea what I would write about. What I did know was that I missed writing, and a blog seemed to be a good way to organize and focus all the ideas that I thought I might be able to pull from the air. There were a few people who wanted me to write again, and I wanted to not let them down. I hope that I did not.

I took my computer with me everywhere I went this year. I sat and wrote outside on a wobbly metal table in Arizona at a Starbucks, in my car waiting for my son at martial arts, at the Pancake House, during a yenta meeting at my other son's old school, at a picnic table in a park with a seagull harassing me, from a hotel room a stone's throw away from 5th Avenue in Manhattan to a hotel room a stone's throw away from the Pacific Ocean in San Diego. I wrote when the sun was so bright I couldn't see my screen, and more often, when it was so dark and rainy I had to turn on the lights. I wrote with tears streaming down my face and not even knowing it, and I wrote laughing aloud at some silly idea. I wrote about things I remembered from my past, things I hoped for in the future, things I believe in, things I hate, observations, rants, statements, poems, fiction, non-fiction, and amalgams of everything. The point is, I wrote. Despite criticism, praise, and any number of mundane, horrific, or wonderful things to distract me, I didn't stop.

For me, that is the real value. I didn't give up. I didn't quit. I understand that the value of what is here is really just for me. It is very gratifying to know that people enjoy what I write sometimes, that I have made them laugh or cry or think or remember or even get angry. But what it gave to me was more valuable than anything I could have written, or anything I could express, even using the thousands and thousands of words here. Maybe someday I will be able to.

So, a year. For better or worse, a year has gone past, and I am a different person from the one who wrote about Safeway on February 28, 2008. The Safeway is still the same, though, with the addition of some delicious new red grapefruit.

Thank you.

The Kinks -- "You Can't Stop The Music"