我会写一本书。真的。

I don't make new year's resolutions.  I think they are doomed from conception and can serve only one purpose:  that of a guilt-factory.  I was once told by a very dear friend of mine (one of the three blessed people who happen to read this blog) that this is a character flaw and something I should focus on immediately.  Perhaps my new resolution should be to make resolutions?

I justify my disregard for the collective starting-over period by saying that I do decide to make changes whenever the need for one happens to hit me in the face, no matter what time of year it arrives.  The problem is that whether it be on January 1st or August 20th, the intended change usually fades within about the same period of time.

Until now.

Some time ago I stumbled upon a wonderful little website, www.onepageperday.com, on which you can type exactly one page, which it will save for you.  If you haven't written yet when the reminder fairies wake up, they send you an email called your "gentle reminder" to write your page that day.  Those emails are very easy to delete.  If they stack up in your inbox and you suddenly have fifteen of them, there is a magical button which blocks them from ever showing up in your inbox again.  New year's mumbo-jumbo defeated!  Then I remember that I asked them to infiltrate my inbox, so that I would actually be productive with my otherwise wasted life and I beg their forgiveness.  This new-found discipline lasts another couple of days until I get annoyed with the "gentle" reminders yet again.

That cycle might continue indefinitely if I hadn't made the mistake of telling that same nagging (and very beloved) friend that I was going to write a book.  Now, for some reason, he keeps asking me how that book is coming.  It's not that I don't want to write a book--I very much do.  It's that working 40 hours a week has got to be the surest way to suck all the creativity out of a person and leave them a dry shell of a human.  By the time I get home I'm so tired of listening to the insane ramblings of our needy clients that all the creativity I can summon is depleted when I add a jalapeño to whatever I'm cooking for dinner.  That little addition is all I have left to contribute to the world.

Peer pressure is a lot harder to resist than an electronic reminder, so I've begun writing my book for the third or fourth time.  If it lacks the spark of humanity that makes literature worthwhile, I blame this system of slavery we expect adults to join in order to be considered "responsible."

"Each person's task in life is to become an increasingly better person."

-Leo Tolstoy