Next!

A common suggestion for becoming a better writer is to use daily writing prompts.

Or so I hear.

Let’s face it, after the epic fail signing up for the November Blogging Month contest and writing absolutely nothing, I can use all the help I can get.

But we’re not pulling up a chair for criticism this afternoon.

Instead, we are taking a deep breath and heeding this advice:

Brene Brown Quote

I love you, Melle. Now write something. Anything. JUST.FUCKING.DO.IT.

So I grabbed one of the WordPress writing prompts stuffed in the dusty jar sitting on my equally dusty desk and this is what it said:

“Today, share something you love about yourself–don’t be shy, be confident!–but that few people know about you or get to see very often.”

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I can’t hide my procrastination, that’s for sure. I think we’re all clear that I have perfected it. I’m so good at it, in fact, that if they handed out degrees, I would be Magna Cum Laude.

I decide to draw another writing prompt. What the hell? I can come back to this one in another post when I have had more time to think about it and come up with a super clever response.

“Tell us about a situation that was not funny at all while it was happening, but that you now laugh about whenever you remember it.”

This blog post?

Next!

“Think about your day. Select one of your daily rituals and explain it to us: Why do you do what you do? How did you come to adopt this ritual? What happens on days when you can’t perform it.”

Daily rituals?

The only daily rituals that come to mind are checking numerous times to be sure I unplugged the curling iron and making the bed (if you can call it that) in a frantic attempt to locate my glasses. My most consistent ritual, however, would have to be…drum roll please…running late.

Next!

“One day, you notice a strange stat on your blog. Write a short piece of fiction or poem that describes what you see, and/or what happens.”

Hmmmm…..

What’s that? What’s that I see? Another person is following me!

Next!

“Is there something you’ve always wanted to learn but haven’t gotten around to? What is it and what’s stopping you from mastering the skill?”

Well, obviously I have wanted to learn how to blog. I could write an entire blog of excuses why that hasn’t come to fruition but the bottom line is the only thing standing in my way is, quite frankly, ME. I’m the hold up here, the road block, the one preventing this from happening.

So it’s time for me to get out of my own way and get this blog going. (Again).

Next!

Having No Idea

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m a curious soul. Plain and simple, I have to get to the bottom of things. I want to know the how and why of every situation because that’s who I am. I firmly believe, she who asks the most questions, learns the most.

My father, however, doesn’t share my passion for curiosity. Whenever we’re catching up, I always ask him questions such as “Whatever happened to so and so” or “How did this or that ever turn out?”

Inevitably, my father’s response goes something like this:

I have no idea.

It makes me crazy that he doesn’t know the rest of the story but no matter how hard I pry or how many questions I ask, my dad’s answer remains consistent.

I have no idea.

My dad’s curiosity level about something ceases to exist the minute it is no longer in his immediate trajectory. He doesn’t give a shit about the couple who lived next door that moved away because, well, they moved away. That’s the end of the story for him. He doesn’t need to know any more.

My curiosity, on the other hand, is infinite.

I want to know what happened to the neighbors after they moved away.

Were they happier? What became of them? Do they miss having my dad for a neighbor?

I want to know all of it, whatever all of it is.

So here’s the ado of it, folks.

When it comes to this blog, I have no idea what I’m doing.

None.

Wish I did. Hope I do one day but right now I’m just trying to figure it all out and determine what it is exactly that I want to say.

But for now…

I have no idea.

There’s this part of me that feels like I’m not being a very good hostess. Here I have invited you to come along and I haven’t been able to tell you what to expect or what kinds of things are going to happen here because

I have no idea.

But, I can tell you this.

I’m going to figure this all out. I’m going to pry and prod and ask myself questions. I’m going to get to the bottom of what it is I actually want to say.

In the meantime…we’re going to have fun!

We’re going to have fun because we’re flying by the seat of our pants out here in Cyberland and even though I have no idea about the rest of it, flying by the seat of my pants just happens to be in my wheelhouse.

You’re in good hands.

So sit back, pour yourself a beverage and enjoy the ride!

The Case of the Vanishing Childhood

Hands down, Nancy Drew had the coolest job EVER.

And it wasn’t even really a job. I mean, it’s not like she got paid for it, right?

Nancy Drew got to hang out with her best friends and hunky boyfriend, Nick Nickerson, while searching for clues that would ultimately lead her to solve some baffling mystery that had left everyone else in River Heights perplexed.

Growing up, my best friend and I read ALL the Nancy Drew mysteries. From the very first page, we decided that we were going to have a future in sleuthing. We would pretend we were the characters from the books and assign titles to every suspicious activity we encountered. The Mystery of the Fallen Tree. The Secret of the Broken Clock. The Key to the Missing Mailbox.

When it came to assigning parts, I, of course, got to be Nancy Drew because I was the bossy one. It doesn’t take a degree in criminology to know it’s the bossy friend who gets what she wants because no one wants to deal with the repercussions if she doesn’t. My best friend got to be Nancy Drew’s dark-haired, tomboy sidekick, George Fayne, despite the fact that I was the one with the dark hair. (Neither of us wanted to be Bess Marvin because she was always described as “slightly plump”. Plus, let’s face it. Bess was not as savvy at sleuthing as Nancy and George).

We established our own club, the Cub Club Detective Agency (we collected teddy bears on the side), of which we were the sole members. We spent hours sketching out plans for a clubhouse that never came to fruition. We would invent mysteries out of thin air. Everyone was a suspect, including Inky the cat who had suspicious spots. We had notebooks and brief cases and fantastical ideas. We had badges and Morse code detectors. We even had a theme song! We used to make commercials on cassette tapes, advertising our amazing ability to solve crimes. Playing detectives kept us occupied for hours. It was our perpetual playground and we lived in it 24/7.

When the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew television series starring Pamela Sue Martin emerged, we were right there watching it. We huddled on the couch of the little house where she and her mom lived and watched it on their little black and white TV (cable wasn’t available where I lived and all my bossiness couldn’t get me a signal without it). We were mesmerized by the handsome Hardy boys and immediately tossed our imaginary River Heights boyfriends aside. We decided the Hardy boys had much more in common with us because they were, after all, just as passionate about solving mysteries as we were. (Wanna take a stab at who got Shaun Cassidy for a boyfriend? I justified it by claiming Shaun Cassidy was the star of the Hardy Boys and since Nancy Drew was the star of the series, it was arguably a logical partnership. Oh, and yeah. I was the bossy one.)

We didn’t limit ourselves to merely G rated characters from books. We were in the business of solving mysteries and whatever tools we needed to adopt to make that happen we were happy to incorporate. We gave ourselves bionic powers and ran around the neighborhood in slow motion searching for clues. Like Jamie Sommers, we swept our hair back behind our right ear, which allowed us to be privy to conversations out of hearing range. (I let my best friend have the Six Million Dollar Man for a boyfriend. It only seemed fair).

Charlie’s Angels empowered us. We realized we could be detectives AND be pretty. No longer did we have to rely merely on our sleuth savviness — we could be fashionable too! Our feathered hair would blow in the wind as we rode around on our skateboards searching for clues. We investigated every inch of our community for evidence of injustice in an effort to make Charlie proud. (As my bossy fate would have it, my brown hair meant I never got to be the most beautiful angel of them all, Farrah Fawcett. Karma gave me the option of choosing between Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith instead.)

My best friend and I thought growing up and becoming detectives would be the coolest thing ever.

But we didn’t grow up and become detectives.

We just grew up. And when we did, our childhood vanished.

My best friend ended up moving away and it’s no mystery that things were never the same. We still got together but geography put a damper on our creativity and the time we spent together became few and far between. Our plans to become partners in solving crime, that we had spent our collective childhood preparing for, had begun to fade. Eventually, the doors of the Cub Club Detective Agency closed once and for all.

I recently came across this unrecognizable stamp that once had our names etched on it along with Cub Club Detective Agency and the address where the clubhouse would have been. It brought a smile to my face.

It turns out my childhood hasn’t vanished at all. It’s right here in my heart where it belongs.

You’re Invited!

One of the cardinal rules for maintaining a successful blog is to blog consistently. Survey says, the only thing I have been consistent about is breaking this rule.

But that’s about to change.

Here’s why.

It just so happens that November is National Blog Posting Month (more affectionately known as NaBloPoMo) and I have decided to participate! I realize this is a pretty epic task to accept for someone whose last post was over a month ago. But here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe you could come along with me on this journey and help me out a little. Accountability, after all, is clearly what I am in desperate need of.

So here’s what I am proposing:

I have accepted the challenge of posting a blog EVERY day for the month of November. I realize this means you will be hearing from me A LOT. I’m by no means asking you to read EVERY post EVERY day but if you could occasionally check in and see how I’m doing and give me some feedback in the comments section, I would GREATLY appreciate it.

I think it will be fun and I’m SUPER excited about it!

So what do you say?

You in?

C’mon.

It’s gonna be GREAT!