The Jackie Blog

This would be a lot more satisfying if I had the other months shown too. Pretend there are 11 more of these.

I was going to write a post today about how I was away from my computer until now, driving toward the northerly patches of New York.  I was going to talk about how I checked my email with great excitement only to find Groupon, Barack Obama, and Living Social.  They aren’t even interested in me.  They just want me to be interested in them.  And so on and so forth until I whine about how I expected to be more important and am constantly let down, like when you turn your phone off all day and when you turn it back on, you’re somehow still kind of disappointed that you don’t have a lot of badgering to reply to.

But I already wrote about all that before.

Isn’t that crazy? I genuinely forgot all about it.  Oh.  Maybe that’s because this is my 356th daily post in a row and that’s the official number of topics I can write before I loop back again.   Now we know.

Oh yeah – hey! I only have, like, nine posts left.  NINE.  I’m getting a lot of “hey how do you feel”, etc.  And with the holidays coming up, I’m sure that my frequent obligations to have human contact will result in that happening more often.  So because I’m already socially awkward enough without people approaching me, allow me to squelch as much of it as possible right now by saying it feels like pressure.  Not pressure to write, exactly.  I felt that for the first three months but after I realized that I had to write whether it was crap or not, I just kind of let it go and wrote whatever I could squeeze out.  Some people call that giving up.  I call it stream-of-consciousness.  I like my term better.  

When I say it feels like pressure, I mean pressure, like, not to die.  Or get terribly ill.  Or break my hands. Or do anything that would make me miss a day and thus require me to start all over again. If I’m repeating post ideas at number 356, can you imagine what a load of fantastical junk 2012 would bring?  Honestly, how many more times can I write about my cats before you unsubscribe?   Maybe twice.  And I’m probably going to cash in on those two this week.

There is perhaps a slight bit of pressure in the area of writing quality, just because I started my official holiday vacation yesterday at 8pm and won’t return to reality until January 3rd: a full two days after my daily posting is shut down.  Every day until then is going to be filled with food, family, sleeping, shenanigans, and fantasizing about never having to return to work again.  

It’s unlikely that my posts will be any good. 

But let’s be honest: you’re not going to read.  Some of you are going to read because you’ve got this whole I-haven’t-missed-a-Jackie-post-yet thing going.  And that’s super flattering and I’d really like to send you a warm puppy in the mail so you can understand how that makes me feel inside.  But aside from you few, the majority of my readers will disappear into the land of egg nog and Auld Lang Syne, never to even see me cross the finish line.

So maybe we can strike a mutually beneficial deal here.  I’ll try not to feel pressured to write anything of substance these next 9 days, and you, in turn, can feel no pressure to tune in to read what is bound to be pretty terrible. 

Deal.

Wow – seriously though.  Nine days.

Good thing – I feel carpal tunnel coming on. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, blogging, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

Today, I almost brought a heart-shattering, epic end to the postaday2011 challenge here on The Jackie Blog.

As many of you know, this blog was fired up in January with the promise to post every single day until 2012.  At least, I hope most of you know.  I’m pretty sure that’s the reason you follow me.  If we take away the challenge, there’s no thrill; no fire; no sense of adventure.  It’s just someone blabbing on and on every day without end.

In order to succeed at posting each and every day, you have to accept that posting is the most important priority you have for that day.  That means that above sleep, above exercise, above food, above entertainment – above everything else – you must submit to the chains of writing every day.  Some days it comes without conflict.  I may not have anything in particular to write about, but I can usually pick my brain for something, dust it off, dress it up, and throw it out into the great, gray nether that is the magical Interwebz.  In fact, most of the times I’ve been challenged by the postaday calling have been related to lack of topics (or ones I feel like writing about anyway), not lack of opportunity.

Today, however, was a real problem.

I traveled out of state this weekend, and though I decided to post every day before I accomplished anything that was fun on my agenda, today I thought I’d tickle myself by waiting until the Megabus ride home and then posting about my surroundings.

Since that usually includes a loud-mouthed cell phone user, a rowdy group of hooligans, and an incredibly awkward situation with a seat partner, I figured it was blog post coal that could be fashioned into a rough diamond. But my bus was not a Megabus.  It was one of those charter buses: the red-haired stepchildren of the Megabus land.  Though it offers comfortable seats, a personable driver, and romantic mood lightning for the evening hours, it does not offer WiFi. 

Poop.

Given that the bus left at 2:30pm and would arrive back to my city around 10:30pm, I had one and a half hours to get to an Internet connection and post this bad boy before I’d have to crawl up in a fetal position under a cold shower and rock myself to a deep, dark depression.

And given that on the way out Friday we had to wait an hour extra at a rest stop while the driver figured out how to open the luggage

I can see the light. Must...keep...posting...

door, I didn’t have much faith in that 10:30 estimation.

After 10pm, nothing was going to be open downtown so I’d have to get to my apartment as quickly as possible – the best option was a bus, which is a shaky plan based on their late Sunday evening schedules.  What if I waited for the bus for 15 minutes, it took 30 to get to my neighborhood and then another 15 for me to walk to my apartment? I’d only have 30 minutes of leeway before I am completely and totally screwed.

I’m not going to lie: it was a close call, my friends.  At  11:30 postmeridian, I published a splattering of my cerebrum to the world of Interwebbage and breathed a large, deep sigh of relief.  I can’t even imagine having come this far in the year and missing a day.  When I think of all the times I’ve forgone sleep, disappeared from family and friend get-togethers, and scribbled down notes throughout my daily existence all for the sake of this challenge, I honestly think the weight of failure would be so great that I’d go catatonic.

Now, of course, all I will do is fret about the remaining month-and-some-change that I need to post.  There’s a lot of travel over the holidays.  And food and friends and family and obligations and expectations.  That’s a whole bunch of obstacles just waiting to render me catatonic from failure.

Things are getting risky indeed; here’s to the treacherous last leg of the postaday challenge. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, blogging, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

For some reason, this image disturbs me.

I have less than 50 posts to write.

I’m pretty nervous about it.

Not nervous because I don’t know what to write.  I never really know what to write.  But about three months in, I had to have a long chat with myself about how I needed to relax and just write and not worry so much about the poo that came out when I did.

With 365 posts in a row no-excuses, there’s going to be some poo.

I’m actually just nervous that something will happen that will prevent me from posting one day.  I mean, I waited until pretty late tonight to post this.  What was I thinking?! I could have lost electricity.  My computer could have committed suicide.  My cats could have held me hostage.

I could have fallen into a spontaneous coma.

Every day, I’m threatened by a plethora of possibilities.  All of these things are threatening my almost-complete goal of posting once every day in 2011.

I don’t want to have to start all of this over again.  Can you imagine how awful that would be? Not that I don’t love you all and everything, but oh my good grief would that be just terrible.  I wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing at the very idea.

What if I get in a car wreck and the nurse the hospital refuses to help me get in touch with someone who can bring me a laptop? What if she doesn’t believe I’m an Internet star and thinks I must have a concussion? What if I die?!

For the record, if I die before I complete these final posts, I don’t want this 2011 goal to be the basis of my funeral or my biography. I don’t want everything hinged on how I almost completed this one thing I set out to do.  

Then again, I can’t really think of any other solid goals I’ve made, so I’m not sure what else the biographer would write.

I’d like to think someone would write a biography.  Or do I have to pay someone to do that prehumous?  I’ll have to look into that.  Great.  There’s something else I have to take care of as this all winds down.

I might just lock myself in my apartment for the remainder of my self-imposed challenge.  That way I can severely reduce the risk of damage to my fingers or my brain.  That’s really all I need to keep going, here. I’m like the little engine that could.  The little nervous engine that could.  The little nervous engine that is huffing and puffing to the finish line.

Yeah.  That last one sounds about right. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, blogging, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

*cue angelic choir*

When I sat in from of my magical screen of wonder last night, I didn’t have anything to write about for today.

It’s been a while since that’s happened.  Usually I can at least write a bad post.  But last night I couldn’t even write a bad one.  I just couldn’t write anything.  So I did what I usually do when I have an issue with words, which is go check the drafts I have in my queue to see what half-written posts I’ve abandoned in the past that might be recharged with a bit of go-get’um-ness.

I had ten in there, but they were all turds.

I decided it was time to trash all the ones that couldn’t be saved (which was all of them).  Something about cats (big surprise), something about tweeting Alec Baldwin (it started out well but went horribly wrong), and other terrible gems that I never wanted to read again or risk anyone else reading were in my virtual storage bin of potential.  But when I attempted to delete them, WordPress told me that “there was an error moving them to the trash”.

I figured it was something or other to do with my wavering connection or my own general stupidity so I refreshed the page and attempted again to weed through the failures of my mind.  Again, WordPress denied me the right to purge my duds.

It must be a sign.  Yes.  It’s a sign from the WordPress Wizards that there is hope in these awful little leftovers.  Somehow, the server refuses to let me part with them for fear I’d be giving up the best post I will have written all year long.  One of them might even be viral gold.  Viral gold!  Once I have viral gold, I can do anything!

The problem is, I don’t know which one WordPress wants me to keep.  I mean, there are nine in there.  And on a scale of 1-10, they’re all zeroes.  So how am I supposed to tell which one is the winner?  How do I weed it from the rest?  Do they seriously expect me to expound on all of those subject and publish them? Because I won’t.  It would be blog suicide.

I guess I’ll just have to dwell on my nine half-written turds until one of them takes on a new and vibrant life that will spawn a large, deeply committed following.

I have heard your call, WordPress Wizards, and I shall not give up until I have dressed one of those pieces of trash into something acceptable. Thank you for your faith in me.

Or your server error.  …I’m going to choose to ignore that possibility. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, blogging, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011