Soundtrack in my head:  The Nails, "88 Lines About 44 Women"

I decided I'm going to do it.  I'm joining NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) and taking the challenge to do one blog entry each day in November.   

There's good reasons for me to take up such a challenge.  I want to get into the habit of writing more frequent and pithy blog postings.  Sometimes I won't write until I think I've found THE perfect topic. But then once I decide upon I topic, I have to keep myself from writing a mini-dissertation, and then I have to go through my writing with a scythe in order to keep people from thinking they're reading "War and Peace."  (Maybe it's because I live with too many graduate students.)

It's kind of funny.  My writing is often parallel to real life.  One in which sometimes (okay, maybe often) I tell myself I have nothing to say and find myself extremely quiet.  Then other times, I find I can't stop talking. 

So through this exercise, I can give myself permission to talk about, well, life. 

I can say, for example, that I'm home tonight instead of DJ'ing at the Madtown Barefoot Boogie like I was scheduled to do because I'm nursing a sprained ankle.  But even my DJ'ing is a reflection of the perfectionist streak in how I express myself.  I always want to be uber-prepared, making sure I've download certain specfic songs and have them burned to a CD, making sure I really know the music I want to play, etc.  I've never been fully quite satisfied with any DJ'ing performance I've ever done, yet people stay on the dance floor and give me postive feedback afterwards. 

So by abandoning this perfectionist streak, and just making myself write, well...it's going to be interesting.  Or boring.  But knowing myself, I think it'll be interesting.

I remember when I was about eight, I got a "One-Year Diary" as a Christmas present.  It was not much bigger than a hockey puck, and each page had the date printed across the top.  I faithfully filled in the posts for January 1 and 2, but I didn't fill in January 3 or 4.   But then I tried to make back-dated entries, and it got to the point where I was writing the lyrics to "Mary Had A Little Lamb" for January 8 in a desperate effort to fill the pages.  I think I pretty much abandoned the project before February. 

I have a feeling that I won't be churning out Blog McEntries with a side of fries for the drive-thru during the month of November.  Partially, it's because I am already a writing addict.  I have to make myself NOT write in my personal journal nowadays.  Entire forests in Oregon are screaming, "Oh no, Steve's writing in his journal again!"  I also think this is going to be an interesting month.  The muse within me is more active than usual, particularly since I made the decision to speak more openly about certain subjects near and dear to my heart. A lot is, well, happening. 

So stay tuned...