1,667 words (or more)...
A friend of mine is participating in NaNoWriMo. November is National Novel Writer’s month. What is NaNoWriMo? It’s a crazy way to get a novel written. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel (175 pages) in one month. Participants begin writing on November 1st and stop by midnight, November 30th.
The number one rule of NaNoWriMo is words, words, words, words, words. That’s right folks, it’s all about quantity - not quality which is why I thought it perfect for me. The organizers of NaNoWriMo expect you to write mostly crap. The idea is if all you are concerned about is getting a certain number of words on the paper you’ll stop sweating the small stuff and hopefully open your mind to the good stuff locked away in there (eventually).
The problem for me is that I’ve only just found out about this awesome event and it’s already November 17th. At any rate - I’ve been in a huge writing slump lately, despite the fact there’s a ton of stuff on my mind. I just can’t seem to get my creative juices flowing. There’s nothing more annoying than going back over journal entries only to read (yet another entry) about writer’s block. My live journal used to be a creative outlet for me but nothing creative has been coming out.
In spirit of NaNoWriMo I have decided to force myself to write a minimum 1,667 words a day. No plot, no nothing - just words, folks.
In light of this, I am expecting to lose many of my LJ friends. I want you all to know up front (It’s OK, I understand). I promise I will not be insulted if (every day even) I sign on to LJ and notice (yet another friend) has un-friended me. Such is life. I certainly don’t want to torture anyone.
I’m doing this for myself and am too lazy to start a new journal account.
I can tell you already the hardest part about this thing is going to be constantly checking the stupid word count feature that comes with Microsoft word. I’m telling you, that thing is off count by at least 500 or so!
‘They’ say (whoever ‘they’ is) that you should write about what you know. The thing is, lately I’ve been feeling more and more that I know less than I thought I knew about anything at all. I’ve been pretty hard on myself lately about not finishing college.
Since Lee started the ACT we’ve been hanging out with some totally awesome and stunningly smart people. I so love to hang with smart people. It makes me want to be smarter and the unfortunate side effect is how I end up feeling about myself for not getting a degree. I realize there are plenty of people out there with college degrees and no common sense. I realize there are plenty of super smart people with no college degree. I still beat myself up for it.
That’s something I’m pretty good at. No one is better at beating me down than me. Everyday I look in the mirror and tell myself how fat I am, how my age is beginning to show, how I’m 36 years old with nothing to show for it. I’m a bad mother/sister/wife/friend/daughter/grand daughter/ daughter in law/Broker. It seems I am never good enough for myself.
Goal setting has always been a past-time of mine but it seems that I’m so focused on perfectionism I always end up giving up on them. Things always have to be ‘just-so’ for me. I don’t understand why it is but I guess the first step is acknowledging it.
Other things I know about myself: I wear my heart on my sleeve. If you so much as look at me wrong and you’re someone I love - you could bring me to tears. I want everyone to love me. Liking me is not enough. I want to be good at everything I do. I am methodical and I hate multi-tasking. I prefer to give everything I do my full attention so I can stay focused and do things right the first time. I usually don’t even like to listen to music or my podcasts when I am at work because my brain wants to focus on one or the other. The only exception would be remedial tasks such as housework - laundry, dishes, cleaning things up. I hate to clean and therefore love to listen to my podcasts or music while doing these things. I love the things that money could buy me but I can’t really afford to have right now. I would love to be able to pay a maid to clean my house. I would love to pay for a private tutor for my kids and pack up my family and travel the world. I have diverse taste in music. If you were to pick up my mp3 player you’d get such a mish mash of stuff you wouldn’t believe it all belongs to the same listener. I will never ever think there is enough time in a day to get everything I want to get done.
I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I can’t picture doing anything that would make me completely happy - except for travel. Even that idea has flaws because I would never want to travel without my family for extended periods of time.
I feel myself growing and changing more than I’ve noticed in my entire life. I finally feel like its ok to just be me. I finally feel like its ok to try and figure out just exactly who me is.
Why is it when you’re a kid it feels like days are so long? I remember literally looking at the clock, counting the seconds, and wondering why time was standing still for me. I remember being ‘bored’ and telling my parents so much. How could I have been missing the boat so badly?
It is a cruel joke to be born the way we are with no knowledge other than instinct to eat and sleep. It is cruel to gain knowledge as the shell our consciousness is trapped in begins to age and lose it’s capability to do everything we want it to.
It is so hard to write like this and not go back and edit anything even go back and read anything. I can only hope (like most things in life) it will get easier as I put in practice the goal to write 1,667 words a day. I can only hope that I stop obsessing over the damn word count button as well.
I have never believed in God. As far back as I can remember I’ve always played childish games to try to prove God to myself. Obviously he never passed any of the tests I put up for ‘him’.
My parents were never very religious (at least not during the time I was being raised). Mom once told me that before we moved to the U.S. before I was born and as a baby that Dad was very religious. She told me he had a rosary and went to church often. Mom probably ‘went with the flow’. I suspect that when she was a kid growing up she did whatever her parents told her to do or believed whatever they told her to believe and she transferred that to Dad when they were married.
It’s sad, but that’s how I see my mother. I see her as the kind of woman that really never had her own ideas or interests. If she did, they were killed long ago by being forced to quit high school in order to take care of her younger sisters because my grandmother was too sick to. She was very ill after having given birth to the last two of her brood of 8 children. Someone had to take care of them and for some reason it was my mom (and not her older sister). I just realized I don’t know the story behind this and will need to investigate further.
She had to focus on being a mom when she should have been focusing on her own dreams. Then she began dating my Dad and found herself pregnant and married at 17 and she became the secretary for my dad’s auto repair shop.
It was some unspoken thing for women to give their lives to their husbands and children. I know my grandmother would never have had eight children if she’d really had a choice. The woman is not very maternal. I truly believe if she’d had a choice she would have been childless. I’m sure birth control was hard to come by not to mention the fact that Catholicism did have an influence on my family back in the day. Grandma was a victim of the same circumstances mom was. A victim of the times. She lived her life like all the other women did back then simply because that was they way it was done.
So my Mom married young - married the only lover she’d ever known. They are still together today. I don’t consider it a happy marriage. My Dad can be so nasty to her and she can be such a bitch to him. I am convinced that they stay together for the same reason they have all of these years. It’s what you do. You commit yourself to one person for life despite unhappiness and because they know of no other way for themselves.
Mom doesn’t know how to not take care of anyone and Dad doesn’t know how to take care of himself. The saddest part is they really don’t ‘do’ anything together. They live together but really don’t seem to have anything in common other than having had raised a family together and have come from the same background.
I know they love each other. How could two people live together for 41 years and not love each other. I also know that love isn’t always enough. It’s sad to watch and I often wonder if they will make it for the rest of their lives together. I wonder if they do will they be able to turn it around and make a happy rest of their lives or will they simply continue to ‘tolerate’ each other?
The number one rule of NaNoWriMo is words, words, words, words, words. That’s right folks, it’s all about quantity - not quality which is why I thought it perfect for me. The organizers of NaNoWriMo expect you to write mostly crap. The idea is if all you are concerned about is getting a certain number of words on the paper you’ll stop sweating the small stuff and hopefully open your mind to the good stuff locked away in there (eventually).
The problem for me is that I’ve only just found out about this awesome event and it’s already November 17th. At any rate - I’ve been in a huge writing slump lately, despite the fact there’s a ton of stuff on my mind. I just can’t seem to get my creative juices flowing. There’s nothing more annoying than going back over journal entries only to read (yet another entry) about writer’s block. My live journal used to be a creative outlet for me but nothing creative has been coming out.
In spirit of NaNoWriMo I have decided to force myself to write a minimum 1,667 words a day. No plot, no nothing - just words, folks.
In light of this, I am expecting to lose many of my LJ friends. I want you all to know up front (It’s OK, I understand). I promise I will not be insulted if (every day even) I sign on to LJ and notice (yet another friend) has un-friended me. Such is life. I certainly don’t want to torture anyone.
I’m doing this for myself and am too lazy to start a new journal account.
I can tell you already the hardest part about this thing is going to be constantly checking the stupid word count feature that comes with Microsoft word. I’m telling you, that thing is off count by at least 500 or so!
‘They’ say (whoever ‘they’ is) that you should write about what you know. The thing is, lately I’ve been feeling more and more that I know less than I thought I knew about anything at all. I’ve been pretty hard on myself lately about not finishing college.
Since Lee started the ACT we’ve been hanging out with some totally awesome and stunningly smart people. I so love to hang with smart people. It makes me want to be smarter and the unfortunate side effect is how I end up feeling about myself for not getting a degree. I realize there are plenty of people out there with college degrees and no common sense. I realize there are plenty of super smart people with no college degree. I still beat myself up for it.
That’s something I’m pretty good at. No one is better at beating me down than me. Everyday I look in the mirror and tell myself how fat I am, how my age is beginning to show, how I’m 36 years old with nothing to show for it. I’m a bad mother/sister/wife/friend/daughter/grand daughter/ daughter in law/Broker. It seems I am never good enough for myself.
Goal setting has always been a past-time of mine but it seems that I’m so focused on perfectionism I always end up giving up on them. Things always have to be ‘just-so’ for me. I don’t understand why it is but I guess the first step is acknowledging it.
Other things I know about myself: I wear my heart on my sleeve. If you so much as look at me wrong and you’re someone I love - you could bring me to tears. I want everyone to love me. Liking me is not enough. I want to be good at everything I do. I am methodical and I hate multi-tasking. I prefer to give everything I do my full attention so I can stay focused and do things right the first time. I usually don’t even like to listen to music or my podcasts when I am at work because my brain wants to focus on one or the other. The only exception would be remedial tasks such as housework - laundry, dishes, cleaning things up. I hate to clean and therefore love to listen to my podcasts or music while doing these things. I love the things that money could buy me but I can’t really afford to have right now. I would love to be able to pay a maid to clean my house. I would love to pay for a private tutor for my kids and pack up my family and travel the world. I have diverse taste in music. If you were to pick up my mp3 player you’d get such a mish mash of stuff you wouldn’t believe it all belongs to the same listener. I will never ever think there is enough time in a day to get everything I want to get done.
I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I can’t picture doing anything that would make me completely happy - except for travel. Even that idea has flaws because I would never want to travel without my family for extended periods of time.
I feel myself growing and changing more than I’ve noticed in my entire life. I finally feel like its ok to just be me. I finally feel like its ok to try and figure out just exactly who me is.
Why is it when you’re a kid it feels like days are so long? I remember literally looking at the clock, counting the seconds, and wondering why time was standing still for me. I remember being ‘bored’ and telling my parents so much. How could I have been missing the boat so badly?
It is a cruel joke to be born the way we are with no knowledge other than instinct to eat and sleep. It is cruel to gain knowledge as the shell our consciousness is trapped in begins to age and lose it’s capability to do everything we want it to.
It is so hard to write like this and not go back and edit anything even go back and read anything. I can only hope (like most things in life) it will get easier as I put in practice the goal to write 1,667 words a day. I can only hope that I stop obsessing over the damn word count button as well.
I have never believed in God. As far back as I can remember I’ve always played childish games to try to prove God to myself. Obviously he never passed any of the tests I put up for ‘him’.
My parents were never very religious (at least not during the time I was being raised). Mom once told me that before we moved to the U.S. before I was born and as a baby that Dad was very religious. She told me he had a rosary and went to church often. Mom probably ‘went with the flow’. I suspect that when she was a kid growing up she did whatever her parents told her to do or believed whatever they told her to believe and she transferred that to Dad when they were married.
It’s sad, but that’s how I see my mother. I see her as the kind of woman that really never had her own ideas or interests. If she did, they were killed long ago by being forced to quit high school in order to take care of her younger sisters because my grandmother was too sick to. She was very ill after having given birth to the last two of her brood of 8 children. Someone had to take care of them and for some reason it was my mom (and not her older sister). I just realized I don’t know the story behind this and will need to investigate further.
She had to focus on being a mom when she should have been focusing on her own dreams. Then she began dating my Dad and found herself pregnant and married at 17 and she became the secretary for my dad’s auto repair shop.
It was some unspoken thing for women to give their lives to their husbands and children. I know my grandmother would never have had eight children if she’d really had a choice. The woman is not very maternal. I truly believe if she’d had a choice she would have been childless. I’m sure birth control was hard to come by not to mention the fact that Catholicism did have an influence on my family back in the day. Grandma was a victim of the same circumstances mom was. A victim of the times. She lived her life like all the other women did back then simply because that was they way it was done.
So my Mom married young - married the only lover she’d ever known. They are still together today. I don’t consider it a happy marriage. My Dad can be so nasty to her and she can be such a bitch to him. I am convinced that they stay together for the same reason they have all of these years. It’s what you do. You commit yourself to one person for life despite unhappiness and because they know of no other way for themselves.
Mom doesn’t know how to not take care of anyone and Dad doesn’t know how to take care of himself. The saddest part is they really don’t ‘do’ anything together. They live together but really don’t seem to have anything in common other than having had raised a family together and have come from the same background.
I know they love each other. How could two people live together for 41 years and not love each other. I also know that love isn’t always enough. It’s sad to watch and I often wonder if they will make it for the rest of their lives together. I wonder if they do will they be able to turn it around and make a happy rest of their lives or will they simply continue to ‘tolerate’ each other?