Remember when I said I was going to keep up with blogging this week? Bwahahahahhaha! Yeah. Me neither.
Tag Archives: writing
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
I’m starting to wonder if perhaps I’ve reached the end of having interesting things to say. These posts get harder and harder to finish. In truth they get harder and harder to start too. For a guy who generally likes to use his words, that’s something of a problem.
Fact is, you’d probably be surprised by the sheer amount of energy that goes into dreaming up a fresh new post five times a week, trying to be at least marginally entertaining (or at least informative), and do it before my eyes go hopelessly crossed from too much staring at a monitor over the course of a typical weekday. Add in the mostly undeniable fact that I’ve been mentally and intellectual bankrupt by the time I back up the driveway these last few weeks and you’ve got a healthy part of the recipe for really bad writing… or at least really forced writing. Those two things don’t always arrive together, but they’re often found as two sides of the same coin.
I take great solace in the fact that the shitshow at the center of my current state of mental decrepitude will be at an end by this time next week. At which time I’m quite confident I’ll “lay me down and bleed a while, and then rise up to fight again.” Until then, I’m almost certain to remain nearly unable to string two reasonably coherent sentences together or really make a decent point of any kind.
And that, friends, is What Annoys Jeff this Week.
I didn’t miss it…
A few minutes ago I realized it was Monday. I also realized I hadn’t written a word since Thursday. Even if it’s not something I’m going to share, a four day break is awfully unusual. It’s even more unusual if you take into account I didn’t make any notes, didn’t proof anything, and didn’t so much think about anything that might be confused with writing. I didn’t miss it. And that’s what really surprised me.
It seems that the long weekend threw me utterly off the routine. I have no idea that getting back to work tomorrow will bring it all careening back into place, but at the moment it all feels like a big pile of “meh.” Maybe that’s to be expected as an appropriate end to a lengthy weekend. Besides if I ever found myself perfectly content with anything I’d be worried that it’s a sure sign of a stroke. As it is, I’ll just take it as a sign that it’s been another weekend governed largely by apathy.
Thanks for nothing…
Due to a particularly long, tiresome meeting today I had papers with margins filled with good ideas – blog topics for days. Once I wrote them down, I promptly forgot about them because, after all, I wrote them down and didn’t need to memorize them. That would be entirely true if I didn’t then chuck my folder with all those margin notes onto a back corner of my desk and then promptly grab my keys and run for the door at the end of the day.
So here I sit with plenty of good ideas locked 20 miles away and utterly incapable of dredging any but the fuzziest recollection from my fragile human memory. This is what happens when I can’t take notes on my phone like a normal person. Yet another reason we should embrace modernity and cast aside the forest of yellow legal pads inhabiting my desk.
So that’s it for tonight. It’s the blog that almost was, but can’t be, because I was fool enough to write my ideas down on a dead tree byproduct instead of recording it as electrons… and because I forgot to throw my folder in my backpack on the way out. But I’m blaming antiquated record keeping methodologies rather than my own, perhaps flawed, end of the day closeout procedures.
The only good to come from this is that it means I may not have to have a single original thought for all of next week.
Zilch…
Yeah, the world’s going to hell in a handbag, but that doesn’t mean I have to write about it every evening. Thats one of the perks of being a blog and not a news site. Even if it’ newsworthy, even if I have an opinion, I can dismiss the issue of the day without fear of blowback. That’s a degree of freedom that doesn’t suck.
Today is one of those days that presented me with a wealth of blog-able material, but I just cant muster enough interest in any of it to justify the 350 words. The challenge of living in interesting times is that now and then it all just feels so very uninteresting.
So there you have it. Not an excuse, but at least a passingly rational explanation for why I’m opting not to turn in my homework tonight.
Sometimes the give-a-shit indicator just doesn’t budge off zero.
An off night…
One of the problems with blogging that no one ever seems to mention is that sometimes after sitting in front of a monitor for eight hours the very last thing you want to do when you’re home and settling in for the evening is once again set yourself down in front of the computer. Tonight is one of those kinds of nights. I’ve sat at my desk now three times since around 6 o’clock hoping that something would pop into my head, but it’s feeling like a lost cause – the rain drumming against the skylights is one of those sounds that may have a propensity to make me very, very sleepy. That’s a good fact to know, but not in any way constructive for getting anything done between now and lights out…
Which, of course is how you end up with a blog post like this one; a few lines offered up to justify how and why I just don’t feel like trying all that hard tonight. After a couple thousand posts, I’m going to go ahead and say I’m entitled to have an off night here and there.
Getting boxed in…
One of the most challenging aspects of keeping this blog is always trying to sit down and say something even on those nights when I have nothing to say. In this case, maybe it’s more of a case of not having anything to say for public consumption. There’s plenty going on here at the cardboard box factory, but none of it is even mildly interesting – and certainly not interesting enough to stretch into an opinion piece. I have the distinct feeling that these next couple of days are going to be more about grinding the job out than having anything entertaining to say about it. There are only so many ways to say moving is a pain in the ass and I feel like I’ve delivered that message effectively already.
Through foreign vacations, career changes, the occasional personal issue, and the regular ups and downs of a life lived I don’t think I’ve ever declared an outright operational pause for this blog. I don’t think I’m going to do that now either because no sooner will I say I’m taking a week off then something stupid will happen and I’ll be right back here writing about it. Maybe I should just say that unlike every other normal week, posts for the next few days may not keep to any particular schedule. Then again maybe they will, but I don’t want to box myself into a case of over promising and under delivering.
For now, jamming the rest of my life’s accumulated possessions into cardboard boxes feels like it should take precedence. In a day or so it’ll be down to me, a few critters, and the network I wouldn’t be able to convince myself to take offline until the last second. The last few days of this process really are nearly intolerable.
Five…
I don’t usually post on Fridays because they tend to be the black hole of blogging. No matter how interesting a post you have, no one is going to see it anyway so it’s generally better to hold it for the next week.
Today is one of those rare exceptions to the rule simply because this is the 5 year anniversary of my transition to WordPress and the introduction of jeffreytharp.com. Big milestone here. It’s the rare bird indeed that manages to hold my attention through 1,826 days, 37,628 views, and 500 comments.
Thanks to everyone who’s been around since the beginning. Welcome to those who are just joining us. I like to think I’m still getting warmed up and finding my stride in the digital world… so we’ll just have to see how thinks look in another five years.
My next fix…
Usually I sit down at the computer with at least a vague notion of what’s going to end up on the screen. It should be something heavy, but not too bleak. Something entertaining, but not too frivolous. It should be witty, but not comical. None of those are hard and fast rules, of course. They’re more like selectively enforced guidelines. Since on any given day what’s going to end up online is up in the air right up until the last minute, I find it best to have very few hard and fast rules. All they tend to do is get in the way of posting something halfway interesting.
Even disregarding the guidelines, I’ve had some trouble today focusing in on what I wanted to say this evening. There were plenty of news articles that I could justifiably talk about. The office? Sure, it’s full of ridiculous things that would be easy enough to spell out in 300 words. The Fortress of Solitude? There’s always something dinging around that I can make sound new and noteworthy. Still, none of those struck a chord today. Nothing stood out screaming “write about me right the hell now.” Most days by the time I get home I’ve got two or three ideas in the running. Days like today, it’s like the theme is just grinding it out, jamming one foot ahead of the next, and getting through to the end.
It’s the kind of day that makes a guy appreciative of the other days – the ones where things go like butter, the words fly onto the page by their own accord, and you’ve got some spark of life left when the lights go out. Three-day weekends, man they mess with the routine. A holiday weekend is a great thing, but getting back makes me feel like a junkie coming down. There’s plenty going on around me, but all I’m really thinking about is where I’m going to find my next fix.
Spooling up…
If anyone has been following along my “official” Facebook page, they’ve probably seen that I’ve spent the last few nights getting my research on. Conveniently, in the modern world it’s easy enough to research from the comfort of my own home. It’s made even easier because the primary sources I’m interested in are all things I wrote between 2008 and the present day.
If there’s anything I’ve noticed while wading through thousands of my own words it’s that some of the writing has been extraordinarily bad. For those of you who have been with me for a while now, I’m sorry about that. Apparently I really do need an editor to follow me around full time. Fortunately, I’m getting the chance to clean some of those issues up as I go along.
The good news is that even though I’m less than two years into the material, there’s also some really good, cheeky stuff in there. Way, way more than enough to build on. Way more than I thought I’d find. When I kicked this off I assumed the research was going to be the hard part. The more I get though I’m realizing that the hardest bit is actually going to be deciding what stays in and what fades back into the mists of the last half decade. Admittedly, that’s not the worst problem I’ve ever faced.
If I had to guess, optimistically I probably have a month’s worth of material left to go through. More realistically it will take me closer to two months after you allow for all manner of what conspires to distract me from making forward progress. After that it’s back to the grind of 300-500 words a night until something that reads like a first draft magically appears on the screen.
Reading back over that last bit, this would be one of those times when I wonder whether I’ve lost every bit of sense I ever had.
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