Hey there

The great thing about having a blog is being able to say whatever, however, and if someone reads it, great, and if not, great, but the words are in the world, not just your head, and on the page where you put them so you can look at them from a distance. Externalize them to gain some perspective. Maybe get a little perspective from a passerby. Passersby.

It feels good to write on the screen again. I have a few word documents of unfinished stories and such, but I don’t visit them much. I have notes in my phone that I jot down when the inspiration hits. Last weekend I sat in the sunny chair while my daughter studied at the desk next to me, and I read through old journals that have collected in a basket there. Most of the entries aren’t dated, and the journals are mostly blank. They all start with a bang and then fade to doodles and to-do lists. Then a new shiny one shows up. Then another. My daughter made fun of my many mostly-empty journals, and I reminded her that someday she and her sister will fight over them. I then found a page among many empty ones that had something silly written in handwriting that is not mine. She smiled. I flipped through a “600 Things to Draw” book and saw a giraffe on the giraffe page that I didn’t draw. She smiled again. The journals are like fly traps. Leave one out and words and doodles will get stuck to a page by unsuspecting passersby (there’s that word again) who find themselves overcome by a sudden urge to write. Silly little girls are particularly susceptible. Had I realized this sooner, I would have spread cute sparkly traps out all over.

I found my one-thing journal while going through the basket. I don’t remember where I got the idea. Maybe I read about it, or maybe I came up with it (I doubt it). The idea is to write one thing down that you learned that day. Anything. After a lot of days you can see you learned a lot of things. Keep one for a year or more and you’ll see the crazy amount of things that you learned and forgot. I relearned last weekend while flipping through my one-thing journal that worms don’t crawl into apples, they crawl out. Eggs are laid in the blossoms, and the apples grow around the eggs. Then the eggs hatch and the worms eat their way out. Nice.

Today I learned that Jon Favreau is a hotshot director who acts in his own movies. I thought he was an actor who always got stuck playing the best friend. Who knew.

Guess what? Tomorrow is Saturday, and I get to sleep in.