October Resolutions

At the start of the last quarter of the year, I do something confined by many people to the first week in January: I improve. The fall calls me to newness, a leftover feeling of back to school, I think. Self-improvement is happier here than in too-cold, too-white, too-dark January, a month whose innate depressiveness ought to be formally decreed. You can’t save it with lists and promises, and you shouldn’t have to put down your mint hot chocolate and try.

My list this October is short: Do stuff. I am a long-time champion doer of nothing, a sitter extraordinaire. With a little wine in me, I’m basically French. I’ve passed whole weekends just staring at things. It’s lovely, but it’s all wrong in the here and 25-year-old now. If nothing changes, nothing will change. That’s a dangerous chance I can’t take.

One component of the new doing is the doing of this blog, which I have been thinking about vaguely ever since I decided to quit writing Planet Tracy in 2003. Blogging had been a serious hobby of mine since my sophomore year of college. To its reputation as the pastime of the pallid self-obsessed, I will say that I don’t think that’s entirely off, I just don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Everyone has their own internal marketing department, quietly coming up with craftier ways to get the word out than to stand on chairs and shout “This is who I am!” Writing is the form that takes for me, and it worked before. At a university of 35,000 people, suddenly a few of them knew that a girl with my name was around, mixing ground beef into her Easy Mac and worrying that every action taken was another tally on the wrong side of the scorecard. Yes, it was angst-y, all about me and what I think. Some people hated that. But some loved it, and I loved doing it, and it made people think, and it made me think, and it made me write more – and some loved it, and I loved doing it… When that happens, who cares if people call it self-obsession?

I’ve not kept it secret that I think of myself as a writer. I can’t say that I am one now (that would mean I’ve been working) or even that I want to be one (that would mean I’ve been working), just that when I think about an occupation plotted over fifty weeks a year for forty years, writing is the only one that does not make me want to throw up. I’m not sure in what specific ways this blog is going to contribute to the achievement of that. But on the occasion of October resolutions, I’m going to start a tiny something, this indefinite thing thing, and hope the oldest two hopes in the world – that there is a point, and that we will eventually know what it is.