You might belong in Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart

A few years ago, I decided to live my year with a motto: NO REGRETS*. This led to various decisions, both good and bad, some of which included 1) Telling a boy I liked him and 2) meeting a boy-stranger from the internet (not Joe). Neither of these situations ended up the way I wanted them to at the time, but they were, I don't know, experiences that I needed to have? Blah blah PERSONAL GROWTH blah.

This year, I've decided to my motto is BE BRAVE. Because, you guys? I'm a total chickenshit. I talk a good game but mostly I just want to sit back and hang out and not worry about if I'm being proactive enough or talking enough or doing enough to ACHIEVE MY DREAMS because did you know that doing dream-achievey stuff is scary sometimes? Or at least it should be. So I've heard. I don't actually know from experience or anything.

I've been sitting here, for a while really, twirling my hair and staring into space and trying to remember the last time I did something that really scared me. And I'm not talking about, like, trying to merge onto the highway in Chicago during rush hour, though that is TERRIFYING, I'm talking about something with actual stakes, something I could fail miserably at, publicly or not, and...I'm coming up blank.

So far this year I haven't really done anything scary but it's not that I've been AVOIDING scary things, it's just that no scary things have come up. Granted, I haven't really been seeking anything out, though, so that's partly on me. But give me a break, it's only January 8th. It's hard to implement a million goals at once, so I'm instead focusing on one or two things at a time, so I don't do what I always do, which is try to do everything at once and then get super burnt out after like a week, which then leads me to give up on everything and go back to my old, lazy ways.

Joe and I have both been trying to write more and have been successful so far, but I told him yesterday that I need to find a better writing system. I used my lunch break to work on some reviews for Cannonball Read (because somehow I'm already behind, even though we're only a week into the new year, maybe because I devoured a million books while I was off of work). I usually write on my lunch break, unless I had to use my brain too much already that day and it’s no longer working, or if I want to leave my closet office for a while and get some fresh air, but let's face it, since when do I ever willingly get up from a computer to go outside?

Anyway, so when I sit down to write something, anything really, it's like I enter some kind of fugue state and just type and type and type as fast as my fingers will allow and, once I'm done with whatever I'm writing, I shake my head and sit back, take a deep breath and think, "wtf, where am I, what have I been doing?" and then I get tired and can't write anymore. So I'm really trying to work more slowly. I think what I'm afraid of is that I'll forget something I want to write down because my mind is all manic, so I feel like I have to type as fast as my brain is working and THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE. Until I can figure out a way to plug the computer directly into my brain, I'm going to have to SLOW DOWN.

So there we go, I guess. My themes for the year are BE BRAVE and SLOW DOWN. I'm not sure how those two fit together, really, or even if they do, but I'll see what happens. I guess I’ll just be brave...slowly? Yeah, that sounds about right.

*I just want to point out that I came up with this motto without having seen Friday Night Lights, which just goes to show you that Tim Riggins and I are MFEO. Just sayin'.