The Blog-off: Only 10 Days Left!

I’ve started three different posts for today’s Blog-off. I keep scratching over my words. One potential post was a continuation of yesterday’s post. I’ve been reading On Our Own: Widowhood for Smarties. I keep putting it down to digest what I’ve read. Then ten minutes later I pick it up again because I’m hungry for more. That made me feel grateful for what I have and that made me want to blog about Thursday when the Greater Good Science Center asked me to come and film a segment about gratitude.

And that made me think of the online gratitude journal they have that is part gratitude journal/part data collection. (It’s different from this gratitude journal that is also part of the Greater Good Science Center.)

And that made me think of my gratitude for the day, which is that I am grateful for the "book rate" at the post office. What a fabulous idea that I always took for granted until I was in the habit of mailing books. And what a lovely bias towards books and learning!

I mean, think about it! To value the shipping of books over, say, regular consumer goods. Somebody said, "We need to make it cheaper to mail books. Otherwise people will have a disincentive to mail books. We must make it cheaper to mail books!" (I was mailing this book and this book.) 

But the real reason I have started three blog posts (but haven't finished any of them) is because I am tired. I am tired of writing. I am tired of cutting and pasting posts to different blogs. Quite frankly, I am a little tired of pitching the Indiegogo thing and the Write On, Mamas anthology. We’ve done well enough so far, right? We’re 35% funded. That’s more than what we had 27 days ago. I can stop, right?

This is the hump. The place where suddenly all kinds of valid reasons and plausible rationalizations grow into giant robot-people. The giant robot-people stomp through your brain and crush your will power. They pee on your self-discipline, which makes it rusty. I’m not making this up.

The giant robot-people come by my house a lot. So I know how to deal with them. You admit that you are tired and you write anyway. You gripe a little and then you cut and paste and share links. You sigh. Maybe you have a glass of wine. The giant robot-people don’t go away, but at least you keep your will power and your self-discipline. And if you’re lucky, while you’re writing you’ll come up with an image—like giant robots peeing on abstract ideas—and you’ll say, “Hey! I like that. I can go to bed now.”