Maybe, in plural

I like Spring. Now, I do anyway. I used to despise it for its fickle weather and that weird feeling it gives to anyone who likes living in dark places, under covers. Spring forces you to come out and look around, forces you to take note and think about the future. Children are born and everything bursts into bloom. And I suppose that's what I hated most: the promise of change.

And I've spent so many of my years trundling around in a theater or interior office or kitchen: windowless rooms in which to perform alchemy, to re-create the world in my own (interior) likeness. And I suppose that's why I hated Spring, which managed to perform its magic in full-view of the sun and sky; while mine required slight of hand, and a, "don't look behind that curtain"!

But today I'm gazing down from a downtown window, the streets filled with lunchtimers, and I'm struck by the hope. It's not warm today, barely sunny, barely spring-like. But folks seem to be skipping, leaping from place to place in joy. Or maybe that's just what I think I see today.

Maybe there isn't more hope today. Maybe I just think there is. And maybe that makes all the difference.

#7, it begins

I've told this story soooo many times...
In 4th grade, with my parents separated (or to be more clear, with my mother single again) and a great sense of shyness and depression settling on me, my mother panicked. Not too great with people, and far too raw to take on anyone else's problems, but still she needed to help me out. So she did what anyone would do: she gave me a 49 cent journal and instructed me to self-medicate.

The one thing that stands out now, though, is that she wrote the first entry. Let me write that again: she wrote the first entry. Allow me to highlight this: SHE WROTE THE FIRST ENTRY. Surely it takes some sort of incredible hubris to create the first entry to someone else's journal, even if the journal is coming from you. But she wrote it in her own voice, from herself, and it detailed how she came to the decision to give the gift. She set some expectations, and she also told me how frequently to make entries. She expected a daily entry. And being a 4th grader, I remained true to form: I never wrote in it again. Oh off and on I'd try, I really would. But you see the tyranny the white sheet of paper staring at me, coupled with her requirement to post daily, however well-intentioned, got the better of me.

37 years and surely 600,000 short tales later, in truth that tyranny is still getting to me today. I just logged in to find 6 differently themed and false-started blogs. Not blog posts mind you, I'm talking fully

thought out and designed blog babies, dressed in their own templates with one to three entries at most, in each.

So in the interest of a clean slate I've deleted these faux-logs. And I've forgiven myself for the failures, and I am congratulating myself on what I'm learning each and every time I post.

So welcome to #7.