Okay, now I am two-thirds of the way through NaBloPoMo. What do I think about the exercise at this point? 

I think it’s been a good exercise for me. I’m not sure if I’ve master “pithy”, but I’m “pithier” than I was. (OMG, I thought I was making up a word, but my spell-check didn’t even go off. Like I said, I didn’t learn the definition of the word “pithy” until well into my thirties.)

There’s a lot to be said for staring at a blank screen and making yourself write SOMETHING. Believe it or not, my last two posts were like that. I mean, Monday night I knew I wanted to write about my experience of signing the Baha'i declaration card, and I pretty much knew how I was going to write it. But I had little time to write, and it was all I could do to stay awake. To my amazement, George Wesley of Baha'i Views thought it was good enough to excerpt.  I’m humbled--again.

Last night was even more difficult because I really didn’t know what I was going to write, and I didn’t have enough synapses firing to write a “random thoughts” post. So I wrote down what was in my head, instead, and it kind of flowed. The “Highway P” state line metaphor juxtaposed with the Bob Dylan song title just sort of popped in my head at the last minute.

My point is that just sitting and staring at a blank screen CAN provide dividends at times.

In some ways this NaBloPoMo is a little bit too easy because it happened to fall during the month I was pretty sure some major life changing events would occur. A lot that I’d kept inside me began to freely come out starting in late October when I decided to make public my decision to leave my previous spiritual path. I’ll see how I do on NaBloPoMo when I’m not going through significant life changes.

BTW, for all Baha'i’s who haven’t figured this out yet: typing the word Baha'i in Microsoft Word 2000 can be maddening because, besides having to have your pinky finger reach an apostrophe mid-word, it’s auto-correct function turns the “i” after the apostrophe into a capital letter, making the look like “Baha’l” in san serif fonts. But you can train AutoCorrect to work for you—I had it so that I’d deliberately type “Bahai” and it would auto-correct to “Baha'i”. Cool, eh? I do the same thing with “co-op”—I type cooop deliberately and it auto-corrects to “co-op.” Just so that people realize that I don’t live in a chicken coop.

I promise to have a Baha'i-free post soon. Give me a break—I just declared a couple of days ago.

Oh, and I’m taking December off. All of it. Really. I’m calling it "NaBloNoNo".

Now for the second edition of suggestions for the dictionary definition of NaBloPoMo:

• A “flavor” of ice cream that is actually thirty flavors stuffed into a single carton.
• When GM it found it had difficulty selling the Chevy Nova in Latin America because “No va” means “doesn’t go” in Spanish, it came up with NaBloPoMo as an alternate name. Sadly, the model name fared even worse than Nova.  I don’t know why.
• One of those strangely named little towns in Rhode Island—located near Woonsocket and Pascoag.
• What you get when a caterpillar attempts to do “The Safety Dance.”