Yes, yes it does.  Sorry.  I was dumb and upgraded to WordPress 3.0 without checking to see if my theme was compatible.  Guess what – it’s not!  Whee!  Good times.  My WP wizard Daisy is working her magic as we speak.

And if you’re reading this on an RSS feed, apologies for the confusion…  I am sure it makes no sense at all.

My mother is a very smart woman.

She now precedes all recommendations with, “So – you will HATE this.  You don’t want to watch/read/listen to it.”  For some reason, this actually works.

Funny little thing, brains.

Because, in addition to my commitments at school, work, and home, I seem to have helped craft a new writing project idea for November.  You may have heard of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.  The idea behind this is kind of crazy, kind of compelling: write a novel-length piece of prose in the 30 days of November.  Conceptually, I can see how this might get me past my, “I want to write a novel-length piece of prose, but what if it’s crap?” problem.  Because the idea isn’t to write a good novel, just something that is that long.  Once convinced of your idea that yes, you can string that many words together about one story, perhaps then you can get out of your own way and proceed crafting something of a decent quality.

It may work, it may not – but I do have one friend who turned the concept into a book contract.  There are probably others.

But procrastinating about writing is more than a common occurrence – it’s a cliche.  So many of us who like to write, like stories, like to read, and want to tell our own stories end up putting it off indefinitely.  Thus it is so that I have about a zillion pieces of ideas around a novel-length piece of prose and have only committed a few of them to pixels.  The rest of those ideas keep rolling around in my head like laundry on an endless tumble-dry, going nowhere.  Perhaps shrinking.  Perhaps I’m letting this metaphor get out of hand.

Enter an idea that sort of bounced around among Rana of Frogs and Ravens, Amanda of Household Opera, and me: NoNaShoStoWriMo, or Not-National Short Story Writing Month.  Instead of committing to a 50,000 words in the next month, we’re shooting for the more modest, achievable goal of about 7,500 words.  I’ve decided to use the ideas/concepts that have been doing the tumbling and spinning and see where I get with it – perhaps that will get me enough of a start so I can use it as a springboard to an actual long-format work.

Anyone with us?

ETA:

And yes, the name does sound like something in Judoon, for all you Doctor Who fans…

I lived for a time with Marie and her husband The Italian out in California after I took the bar exam, but before I knew if I had passed.  Marie and I were out grocery shopping, and she mentioned that she had heard grocery stores were good pick-up places.  We joked about this for a bit, since I hadn’t had a date in months, and Marie said, “Well, you point out one you like and I’ll hit him with the grocery cart for you.”

And a cute young man at the end of the aisle looked up at us and grinned.

And Marie and I did that girly thing where we laughed and collapsed into one another as we fled the scene, embarrassed.

But now I know I would absolutely knock “accidentally” into a potential suitor for X if she wanted me to.  I wouldn’t want to go back to dating for anything, but acting in a supporting role for someone else’s drama?  Potentially fun stuff.

The short answer is, “no.”  The longer answer has something to do with the combined effect of summer, school, and a full-time job.  I haven’t felt much like doing a lot of the things I usually enjoy doing: writing, running, and knitting are all on that list these days.

In the past, I might have freaked out, decided that I must make myself do these things I enjoy doing — else, who am I?  Enter identity crisis, then insert frenzied period of making a job out of things I enjoy, which is pretty much a one-way ticket to aversionville.

It only took me a couple of decades to figure out how utterly insane this is.

So, my new method of dealing with that feeling is to use the old “if you love something let it go” philosophy.  I have a pretty solid notion that these things I do truly love to do will return to me in their own time without my insisting that they Come. Back. Right. Now.  (A negotiation tactic that is only slightly less effective on one’s own desires than it is on our dog — which is to say, on a scale from “not very” to “not at all”).

In the interim, apologies for the light posting.

The Komen Race for the Cure is less than a month away (June 6) – if you have a couple of bucks to throw to a worthy cause (breast cancer research), please consider supporting me.

Thanks.

Hey!  Do you dislike some Thing?  Has someone else expressed an appreciation for that Thing?  Well, by all means – the most appropriate thing is to crap all over that Thing!  Otherwise, how else would anyone know you’re too cool for that Thing!  Now go – be scathing!  Extra points for using a really limited data set to express how little you know about that Thing!

“Doesn’t [person] have anything better to do?”

Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, knitting, reality TV, insert your guilty pleasure here.  We all have them, but some killjoy is just dying to make you feel like a fool for your choices.  This cute little number is intended to make the target feel like a frivolous, time-wasting moron.  On the other hand, I suppose one is to infer that the speaker is a virtuous ascetic who only expends effort to create great beauty or value.  Right.  Get back to me when you’ve won the Nobel Prize.

It also makes me wonder, “Why do you care so much?  What about this activity gets up your nose so much that you feel the irresistible need to sneer?”

I would also venture to guess that the subset of people who are superciliously passing judgment and who have also tried that thing approaches zero in nearly every circumstance (which would tend to account for the fact that speakers of this phrase seem to think that typing out 140 characters a couple of times a day takes So Much Time).  Therefore, I shall now respond to all such questions by saying, “No, actually — and don’t you have anything better to do than to make fatuous judgments about stuff you don’t understand?”

“I am the kind of person who…”

This one reminds me of the quote often attributed to Margaret Thatcher, “Power is like being a lady; if you have to tell someone you are, you aren’t.”  (I can’t find an authoritative source for this — at least not swiftly).  The point is, all too often the quality that follows this statement would rarely be attributed to the speaker by anyone who knows them.  It’s almost a guarantee of willful blindness to one’s own personality.

A close cousin to this statement is a manager’s boast that he has an “open door policy.”  Generally, this person only has the door open the better to swing it firmly shut on your ass and your ideas.

“I have to be honest with you.”

After hearing this, I always think to myself, “Okay… how many lies did you tell me prior to this statement?”

“Get a life.”

You first.

Got any choice hateful phrases you would like to see banned from polite conversation?