Week One

It's a new year. I'm ringing it in in style - cheap wine, When Harry Met Sally, dog cuddling, flu recovery, and a new blog. I don't know how long this blog will last, or how consistent I'll be, but I'm going to try. See, I've been thinking recently that I need to liven things up around here. Not that my life is boring, or that I don't enjoy it; on the contrary: I have a great life, and I love it just the way it is. But what if it were different? What if I'd been born in a different country? What if I'd become an architect? What if I'd grown up poor? What if I lived in New York City? These are things primarily out of my control, but there are things I could change, and that's what this blog is about.

I want to try new things, some of them little, some of them bigger. But I don't necessarily want to make any huge life changes. As I said, I'm happy the way things are. But I'm also a firm believer in getting the most out of living as possible, and I know I'm not doing that. So to make strides towards that end, I want to try things, just one week at a time. I've got some ideas: hiking every day for a week, writing letters (with pen and paper!), being a teetotaler, being a drunk, writing every day, picking up roadside trash, watching classic movies I've never seen, reading non-fiction, eating only local food, not eating any sugar, talking to strangers at bars, telling loved ones how much I appreciate them, not using a telephone... I could go on and on, which is a good thing, since theoretically I want to do this for a year, so I need fifty-two ideas.

Ideally, this blog will be a place in which I record my experiences and reactions to those experiences. It may be quite boring; after all, how exciting can being sugar-free for a week be? But hopefully I'll be able to explain the reasons behind each of my choices, and how the week affected me, or didn't, as the case may be. So, since I am still in recovery mode (I got sick on Christmas Eve (the second sickness in as many weeks) and still have a phlegmy cough, congested ears which give me fuzzy hearing, and I blow a lot of snot out of my nose), I thought that this first week should be something physically easy: writing letters!

I sort of hate technology. I actually just got a new cell phone today, and I'm pretty bummed about it, but the one I've had for the past five and a half years stopped dialing the number 8, so a new one seemed necessary. Though I'm quite shy, and mostly think people are stupid and annoying, I hate how technology makes it so easy to avoid human interaction. Of course, I love email. I use it all the time. I keep in touch with people I normally wouldn't keep in touch with, I can communicate quickly with people, and I basically save a lot of time with it. However, I mourn the loss of letter writing. Taking the time to actually think about your thoughts, to write with deliberation, to imagine the letter traveling across the country or world, waiting eagerly for a response that may or may not come.... So I am going to search through my address book, find some people I have been out of touch with, and take one of my fun-colored pens to paper, and write a good old-fashioned letter.

I'm just trying this out, and hopefully I'll stick to it, but I've been known to give up on things, so we'll see how it goes. One week seems doable though, for almost anything. And maybe you'll get a little insight into my soul (if you want it, of course; if not, maybe you'll get a little dose of humor... maybe; I'll do my best with the humor thing).