Yeah, the most boringest of boring titles. Sometimes that’s just how things go…
Lots of different shifts and movements in areas of my life, and instead of trying to do the grand interweaving thing right now, I’m just going to scatter out some news and work on any “deeper understanding” some other night.
Now that the weekend is here, I can catch up on my Blogging 101 assignments. A few of the assignments I haven’t posted about are “under-the-hood” ones: find new blogs, connect with people in the discussion boards, play around with the visual theme of your blog. I’ve done the first two and at some point I’ll make time to play a bit with the visual design here on JALC. During that Baltic cruise, I actually took a lot of landscape-orientation “texture” photos (things like a lacquered wood floor in The Hermitage, or a ceiling mosaic from the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood) thinking precisely of their use-value for Facebook and blog headers. Now if only I would actually take the time to download those July photos from my camera’s memory card to actually sort through them and start using them…
But one of the assignments was a post topic: the suggestion to
publish a post for your dream reader, and include a new-to-you element in it.
Today’s post is a Blogging 101 “two-fer”: I’ll be playing catchup on the first two assignments for the challenge — a task made rather a lot easier by the fact that I completed these same two assignments back in September.
Taken as a pair, the assignments are basically a gesture of announcing one’s bloggy self to the big wide world, first with a statement of your intended focus/goals for blogging and, next, a revision of your blog name and tagline to bring it into alignment with said focus and goals.
(Tonight’s title, by the way, stems from my inability to roll with the inevitable Destiny’s Child reference and my insistence on looking to different musical inspiration…)
I’m not one for making New Year’s Resolutions. But I’ve built up a handful of New Year’s traditions over the decades.
There’s the cliched gestures of celebrations — a good bottle of champagne, watching the countdown on TV, a shared kiss with Mr. Mezzo as one year turns to another. There’s also more idiosyncratic and introspective rituals — journal-writing, drawing a Tao card to discern the theme/intention for my year.
But however cliched, common, introspective or idiosyncratic, I have an entire bushel of New Year’s traditions that’s been a little bit off-track.
Because I slid into 2015 in much the same state I was recently bemoaning from so much of my 2014 experience: sick.
Mr. Mezzo has been spending the last week making preparations for his imminent descent in NaNoWriMo. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, NaNoWriMo is a (mostly) virtual event in which a bunch of writers band together and pledge to write a 50,000 word novel during the course of November. (Hence the name: NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth.* This will be the second time he’s done it, and I’m wondering if I should maybe do something of my own in solidarity.
Now, I’m not crazy enough to do NaNoWriMo. For starters, there’s the fact that I live in a Newtonian universe where time and energy are finite resources. I still have those two classes I’m finishing up, plus choir, plus the fact that I’m just now beginning to pull myself out of the black hole I recently fell into. More importantly than those practicalities is the fact that I don’t currently have a strong idea for a book. I know I’ll write one someday — but this day is not that day. (Or “this month is not that month.” Something like that.)
But NaBloPoMo? That’s a entirely different kettle of tea.
Clearly, I took a little blogcation over the weekend. I wish I could say it was because Mr. Mezzo and I were having a romantic getaway weekend (though we have one of those scheduled for October), or even because I was at one of my hard-working spiritual retreat weekends (though I have one of those scheduled for October, too).
The truth is just much much more mundane: I simply couldn’t get my head in the game.
Today’s assignment from Blogging 101 is two fold:
publish a post for your dream reader, and include a new-to-you element in it.
So without further ado, let me get part two of the assignment out of the way post-haste by admitting that, ever since I saw the phrase “Dream Reader,” this has been stuck in my head.
The dreaded earworm strikes again!
The Day 2 challenge for Blogging 101 is about editing your blog title and tag line. To me, it’s an additive exercise to yesterday’s “who am I and why am I writing” meditation — now just taken that one next step of distilling that mission statement to its essence in order to create a title and tagline that, to quote the assignment, “give visitors context and help them decide to stick around.”
Obviously, being as I am already 5 years and/or 6 months into the game, I have a well-established blog title,* and it’s one I’m not eager to change. The question of tagline, though, is wide open for consideration, and I’m happy to talk about both these elements after the jump.
Because I have decided that 5 hours of sleep per weeknight is just too much of a luxury, I have decided to enroll in another challenge over at WordPress’s Blogging U. Blogging 101 is intended for individuals right in the start-up phases of bloggy creation. This invitation to register articulates the deliverables in this fashion:
On Day 30, you’ll have six (or more!) published posts and a handful of drafts, a customized theme that reflects your personality, a small but growing audience, a good grasp of blogging etiquette — and a bunch of new online friends.
So, considering that I first founded JALC some 5 years ago, and revived it more than 6 months ago, I am either well behind the times or way ahead of the game on this one. Still, I think it’ll be a good exercise for me.
I’ve been in recent conversations about the value of design thinking, and the ways that taking the time to step back and question your automatic habits and questions can be a good way to unlock a more intentional creativity. I see the Blogging 101 container as a way for me to foster that sort of intentionality here on JALC.
So, here we go…
(Part seven of my exploration of the 25 songs in 25 slightly-more days blogging challenge — a way to bank and pre-schedule a few posts for JALC while I’m off a-travelling.)
Day Song 7: A song that reminds you of the past summer
Since we are are still in the midst of summer 2014, I began thinking about this prompt by casting my mind back to the summer of 2013, even looking up a couple of those “songs of the summer” lists. And there were a few titles that jumped out at me. Imagine Dragon’s Radioactive playing into the closing credits for season 6 of True Blood, as a group of Hep-V vamps closed in on Merlotte’s to attack it. The mini-kerfuffle around Daft Punk backing out of their appearance on the Colbert Report, and the brilliant dance video Colbert and friends concocted in response to the “crisis”:
But when I really thought back on my summer, it became very clear to me that my song choice needed to go in a different direction:
Obviously, I’ve mentioned here and there about our move from Philly to Boston, but I don’t think I’ve talked in detail about how things unfolded. I came up first, in March, signing a short-term lease on an apartment so I could start the new job that was precipitating our whole New England adventure. Meanwhile, Mr. Mezzo stayed behind to put our house on the market and start his own job search.
And we have much to be grateful for around this, because things went about as smoothly as you could possibly hope for. The Philly house sold within a couple months, Mr. Mezzo had a job offer in the same couple weeks we were executing the house sale paperwork, and he and all our worldly goods were up in Massachusetts come late-July.
All told, we were only apart for about 4, 4-and-a-half months: a much shorter time than it could have been, and a much shorter time than we’d feared it might be.
Still. I don’t recommend it, and it was NOT fun. So we tried to be very intentional about doing things to stay connected to one another, even while living apart. And one of those things was our weekly Game of Thrones date night.
Even though most of our TV-watching is done via the commercial-forwarding magic of the DVR, we made the commitment to watch each new episode during its first telecast. (A commitment easier to keep by HBO’s lack of commercials and the knowledge that real-time viewing was going to be the only way to stay ahead of the water cooler recaps in our separate offices come Monday morning.) Then, as soon as the final credits and “exciting scenes from next week” had concluded, one of us would call the other and we’d talk and compare notes. What scenes we’d enjoyed, what we thought would happen next, what plot twists had surprised and shocked us. (I’m sure you can imagine our conversation after the Red Wedding episode…)
It was a completely everyday, frivolous, fun sort of conversation. And that’s what made it so wonderful. Amidst all the other things we were needing to talk about — contract this, inspection that, employment status here and there — having this weekly ritual helped us stay connected with the sort of everyday, seemingly-banal sort of contacts that are such an essential part of weaving the tapestry of a shared life together.
So, thank you, George R.R. Martin. You may be a murderous bastard who kills off everyone I most love in Westeros, but you gave Mr. Mezzo and me the gift of connection during a tough time. Honor and gratitude.
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