Hi, Rebecca!

Your 'Back to the Blog' post was very well timed.  I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about writing and the fact that I do it neither often nor well these days and how I feel about that.  I'll spare you, but suffice to say that this poor, sad, abandoned blog has been somewhat on my mind.

Back in the days of LiveJournal, fresh out of undergrad, having a blog was a great way to keep in touch with all the people I was barely ever going to see anymore.  More importantly, though, it was a reason to arrange my thoughts into an intelligible structure and put them down in black and white, something that I had no formal reason to do after school was all done and gone.  It was a great way to share a problem or an experience or a clever turn of phrase and feel heard, just by a select few people that I actually cared about. 

Blogs fell away in large part, I think, because Facebook made it possible to do exactly the same thing with a metric shit-tonne less effort.  Back when 50 Facebook friends was considered a lot, it fulfilled much the same function - letting you keep in touch with people, get to know people, grandstand just a little.   There are probably a lot of reasons why Someday Sparrow never really got off the ground, but partly it was just a different time.  The internet had moved on and having a blog in the 2001 sense of the word - no theme, not monetised, intended audience in the double (or even single) digits - just didn't make sense anymore.

Now that Facebook, and social media in general, has become a lot less about community and connexion and a lot more about pointless shouting into the void, it feels like a good time for blogs as we knew them - friend blogs that are just because - to make a resurgence. 

Will it be less than six years before the next post here at Someday Sparrow?  Only time will tell. 

Be It Resolved

Well, it's that time of year again.  Like many people, I spend a lot of time over Christmas holidays making lists - sometimes only mentally, sometimes not - of the ways I would like to improve myself in the new year.  I actually sat down the other day and made a list of what I thought was supposed to be New Year`s Resolutions, things that I wanted to accomplish in 2013.  I wound up with 25 items, two of which have sub-lists of 3 items apiece.  This list includes such gems as `Get a haircut', 'Check calcium levels', and 'Go to the dentist'.  Finally, I came to my senses and labelled it 'New Year's To Do List'.

I'm not sure why I was making a list of resolutions in the first place.  In the last few years, I have had pretty reasonable success with my policy of eschewing resolutions in favour of inclinations.  I find the lack of decisiveness pleasantly unintimidating.  This year, for some reason, I'm all about the decisiveness.  It's very unlike me.

Over the last year, for one reason or another, my life has been, or felt, to varying extents 'on hold'.  I won't get in to why, because it's not very interesting, but the result is that things just do not get done.  My room is a disaster: there are piles of unsorted papers lying around everywhere; there are two unpacked boxes in a corner, left over from the move in June; there are, I confess, dried up puddles (yes, plural) of cat vomit on my floor.  My laundry basket actually broke from excessive weight.  My mp3 player is full of podcasts I haven't listened to and  I am constantly surrounded by books and magazines I have not yet read.  I haven't touched my guitar in over six months.  (I was getting really good at that C major scale.)

I've reacted to this chaos with my usual manic list-making.  In the time it took me to write the last two paragraphs, I added 5 more items to my New Year's To Do List (including 'Mop floor', you may be relieved to know).  Soon I will divide this list into categories with coloured pens, because that's how I roll.

At first blush it might appear that my inclination for 2013 is to be more organised, but that would be wholly unnecessary.  I already have those coloured pens, after all.  I'm actually really good at organising chaos...in my head at least.  That's not really the issue.  What I need to do now is put away the coloured pens and just clean my room, do the laundry, pick up the phone and call the dentist.

In 2013, I resolve to get stuff done.

If you are so inclined...

Three or four years ago, as most of you know, I stopped making New Year's resolutions in favour of expressing New Year's inclinations, on the grounds that resolutions are depressing when you inevitably fail to keep them. I think the reason that I have so much more success with New Year's inclinations is that they generally tend to reflect more accurately the things I would like to accomplish in the up-coming year, rather than the things I think I should want to accomplish.

The consistent exception to this rule is 'learn to drive', which I'm pretty sure has appeared on every list of New Year's resolutions or inclinations I have ever made. This year I am admitting publicly what should be obvious to all - I am neither resolved nor inclined to learn to drive. I know I should do it - I should want to do it and I should do it even though I don't want to - but the sad truth is this: there is very little likelihood that I will learn to drive in 2011 and I'm OK with that.

Over the last few days, I've been taking some notes for this year's inclinations on my Blackberry's MemoPad. (NB: I have a Blackberry!!!) Reviewing these notes, it occurred to me that this year's list was set to become a depressingly bloated version of last year's. Which was:

- get my driver's license

- maintain a respectable balance on my savings account (current balance = 8.21$)

- acquire healthy eating habits

- exercise periodically

- engage in charitable activities of some kind

- take better care of my cat

It should be noted that, apart from giving slightly more than I could afford to the Red Cross for earthquake relief, I didn't make even the smallest of dents in any one of these.

Anyone who knows me knows that 2010 was a pretty big year for re-direction. All of my stupid life choices blew up in my face in a spectacular way and then suddenly, when the dust settled, everything was totally fine. It was all very disorienting and weird. The lesson I learned from all of this, though, is that the benevolent forces of the universe do a much better job of controlling the direction of my life than I do. I think an exhaustive list of resolutions masquerading as inclinations is probably not in keeping with with this realisation.

As such, in 2011 I am inclined to concentrate on getting enough sleep and let everything else take care of itself.

Contrary to popular belief, it is in fact the *second* step that is the most important.

Apparently it was Confucius who said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Confucius was a pretty smart guy, so I assume that he knew - though he seems to have neglected to mention - that quite a bit of standing around doing nothing begins with a single step as well.

There's kind of a running joke in my family that when somebody asks you if you've made any progress toward a given goal and the answer (as it always is) is 'no', you look at that person with a look of exaggerated hopefulness and enthusiasm and say, "No, but I've been *thinking* about it!" This happens a lot, because in my family we are aways hoping- ineffectually - to fix ourselves.

Everybody knows that the first step to solving any problem is to have a plan. You develop a thorough understanding of the problem (through intense contemplation, which is the same as work) and then you develop a plan, a perfect, fool-proof plan, which you plot in great detail and perhaps - especially if it is a particularly daunting problem - map out in helpful diagrams with coloured pens. And then if anybody asks you if you've managed to solve the problem yet you say, all full of hope and enthusiasm, "No, but I've been *thinking* about it!" I do this a lot and I have to admit that it's rare that I ever get past the part with the coloured pens (that's my favourite part). Very few of these elaborate, fool-proof plans have ever made it from intention to implementation.

This has been on my mind lately, because I was sorting through some papers as part of my spring cleaning ritual (yes, I know) and I kept finding helpful little notes I had written to myself in moments of what I no doubt hoped at the time would turn out to be life-changing epiphany. They range from the practical - "*Always* sleep min. 8h", "Do yoga", "Take vitamins" - to the whimsically mysterious - "Love the dawn" and "Time is infinite, but you are not". By far the most useful and applicable of these little forgotten epiphanies was this: "Thinking is not doing".

Maybe it would help me to get a prominently-placed tattoo of this maxim. I probably won't, though. Probably you'll ask me next time you see me if I've gotten around to getting that tattoo yet and I'll say, "No, but I've been *thinking" about it!"

Sparrows don't care about our silly human problems.

One day a year or so ago, when I was in the middle of pretty much the shittiest period of my life thus far, bracing for the impact of a couple of really stupid decisions and trying to convince myself that it was all going to come out ok, I stopped by my friendly neighbourhood fry truck for my usual nutritious lunch. As I sat on some concrete steps, munching, and watched the sparrows going about their sparrow business, I thought to myself, "Someday, I 'll be a sparrow. I'll flit around, right here by this fry truck, puff up my feathers against the cold and sing for scraps of hot dog bun".

That was pretty much the most relaxing thought I've ever had. Now every time I get stressed about something, I just think about how little I'll care about that thing when I'm a sparrow and I feel better right away. I'm not necessarily recommending this as a stress management technique for others - particularly since it requires that you be completely irrational, which is something I'm a lot better at than most people - but it has never failed me yet.