An End-of-Year Meme, 2009 Edition
2009 was a pretty hard year for me. I lost a lot of the motivation and drive to create I’d been feeling, and my desire to write and blog dried up. (Check out November—only one post in the entire month, and that was on November 30.) But it was also a great time. I made several comics, started teaching myself to draw, and read my first Vonnegut novel (The Sirens of Titan—still not sure what I thought of it).
Anyway, enough blathering. This is the same meme I did in 2007 and 2008, with a slight variation. Happy New Year!
The rules for the meme: Take the first line from the first post of every month for the last year, and post them together as a kind of cross-section of what you were blogging about during the year. Remember to link to all the posts you are excerpting. I’ve added some stats for each month to kind of get an idea of how much, and what, I was posting all year.
06 January 2009: Child of Mormonism
. . . as I started leafing through the mission papers and letters and notebooks and journals I was sucked right in. I didn’t really keep a journal when I was a teenager, so my mission writings are a fascinating glimpse at a young me who was very earnest, desperately conflicted and working very hard to reassure himself that GOD EXISTED AND THE CHURCH WAS TRUE DAMMIT. Besides my doubts and shaky faith, my mission was incredibly stressful and almost proved too much for me emotionally, and the journal entries provide a picture of a young man continually on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Stats for January 2009:
11 posts, 1 flashfic, 70 comments
06 February 2009: Flashfic Friday!
It’s time for the new and improved Flashfic Friday, where I post something short and sweet (and, knowing me, probably gory and disturbing) every Friday, and you let me know what you think.
Stats for February 2009:
12 posts, 2 flashfic, 1 essay, 1 comic, 3 recipes, 48 comments
03 March 2009: Music Dump
I was watching Neil Gaiman perform “Creepy Doll” on YouTube with Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm and I realized that I only had six Jonathan Coulton songs in my iTunes. I know! Crazy, right?
Stats for March 2009:
6 posts, 32 comments
01 April 2009: Trying Out the Flock Browser
Trying out Flock, the “Social Web Browser.” So far it just seems loud and busy. But it claims to be able to post to my blog, so we’ll see. Maybe I’ll keep it around.
Stats for April 2009:
6 posts, 20 comments
03 May 2009: My Muse Is Flown
One of the first things that goes when I’m stressed, overtired or out of sorts is my creativity. Not only can I no longer write, I no long even feel the urge to, which is such a bizarre loss that it always catches me completely unprepared. Even worse, I become utterly uncreative and inflexible in my day-to-day life as well, which means I find it harder simply to deal with things. You might not realize how much creativity you use in making mundane decisions, but believe me, you’d miss it if it were gone.
Stats for May 2009:
8 posts, 20 comments
03 June 2009: Wrong Number
Her: Hi, is Amanda there? I’m [name], and I’m calling on behalf of… the fact that I’m getting induced tomorrow.
Stats for June 2009:
12 posts, 42 comments
07 July 2009: Tuesday Morning Aggravation – UPDATED!
Confused patron: Can I have the address to Nashville?
Stats for July 2009:
12 posts, 91 comments
01 August 2009: Bit Off More Than She Could Chew, Maybe
Today, a woman walked up to the reference desk and asked me for a zucchini bread recipe—any zucchini bread recipe… except she didn’t want it to “make too much.”
Stats for August 2009:
7 posts, 10 recipes, 20 comments
01 September 2009: Try Staples. It’s right down the street.
Patron: “Do you have a manila envelope?”
Stats for September 2009:
10 posts, 3 comics, 44 comments
05 October 2009: My god! It’s full of stars!
So, this is my last semester with The Library Science Program That Will Not Be Named. And—besides finishing 36 hours of coursework—in order to finish the program, students are required to submit to a Right of Passage known as the Capstone Experience.
Stats for October 2009:
7 posts, 1 flashfic, 4 comics, 38 comments
30 November 2009: Say what?
Me: WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION.
Stats for November 2009:
1 post, 3 comments
05 December 2009: The REAL Reason I’m Single
I can’t imagine being in a relationship because I do everything by myself. Almost literally everything. I sleep by myself, shop by myself, go to movies by myself, go out to eat by myself, watch TV by myself, crack jokes by myself (some of which make it on Twitter/Facebook, but not all), cook by myself, etc., etc. It’s not that I mind doing stuff with other people; it’s simply not part of my routine. And frankly, deviating from my routine annoys me. Hear that, friends? Quit asking me to do things with you. It cuts into my Farscape-watching time, goddammit.
Stats for December 2009:
5 posts (including this one), 1 recipe, 15 comments
Like
January 1st, 2010 at 7:13 pm
Hi Sean,
When you write that your muse has left you, I can relate. Between the ages of roughly 31 and 33, I wrote 750,000 words in a blog that I had at the time. I wrote every day, obsessively, with intense passion and excitement. I wrote about the three great topics of my life: my undying love for a (straight) fellow I could never be with, life after death (the constant, stable core of all of my philosophical work from which everything flows and to which everything returns), and the greatness of the human adventure expressed through myriad experiences. I wrote and wrote and wrote, until one day, I declared that I had nothing further to say, and the writing stopped on its own.
I had gone from being able to write 10,000 words over the course of 5.5 uninterrupted hours, to nothing. I had exhausted my ideas. I had finished my third university degree, and at that point, freshly out of the academic environment, I felt as if something important in me had…if not died, then grown exhausted and dormant.
It was literally painful for me to read you say that you might never return to school again. I hope that that’s not true. I’m glad that you have your roommate (being alone would, I suspect, be very difficult, especially over time), but concerned about my sense that to some degree you’ve given up fighting to create meaning in what can be an absurd universe, one so poignantly illustrated through your vignettes about library patrons.
My friend Doug wanted a relationship so badly that, after too many years of rejection and loneliness, it led to his suicide. It was the only goal in is life that mattered. A lot of people that I work with (and I) struggle with having a job as opposed to doing meaningful work that they love. Those who don’t have children seem to have an especially hard time, because rarely do they have something to look forward to. Without any of those three: a loving relationship, meaningful work, and positive expectation (hope), what’s left but a desolate existence, going through the motions without feeling alive?
As I’ve said many times before, you’re a great, great fellow. Your life matters, and you’ve got the talent to accomplish a lot over the many coming decades.
I wish you a joyous new year, the boyfriend of your dreams, novel and inspiring experiences, lots of new friends, and encouragement to never, never sell yourself short.
And if you don’t reconnect with your muse soon, find a way to travel to Sedona, AZ, just for a few days. It’s a magical, breathtaking place–a place to rest and recuperate, a place to feel inspired to create again.
Cheers to health, wealth, love, contribution, community, and meaning on this first day of the new year. :-)
Steve