This time of year, there is no shortage of excuses for my blogging lapse. There’s parties, presents, cards, and a general early-winter fatigue — a byproduct of the short cold days that have remained horrifyingly snowless in Boston. Yesterday I curled up on the coach with a book — me, on the coach, with a book, at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. I should be blogging, I remember thinking before dozing off with my fingers spliced in between the pages. I woke up to find the sun had disappeared and it was time to get ready to go out to eat.
I should be blogging, I thought today, as I made biscotti for tomorrow’s cookie swap at work. I should be blogging, I thought as I wrapped presents. I should be blogging, I thought as I wrote out Christmas cards. I should be blogging, I thought as I agonized in the aisles of Whole Foods over what trinkets I should buy for some close co-workers. I should be blogging, I thought after I logged into my WordPress account with all intention of blogging, only to get caught up in the task of deleting the hundreds of spam comments that have steadily accumulated. (I simply cannot weed through 800 spam comments about Cialis on the off-chance that someone has actually left a real comment in the past month.)
Even in my 7am hot yoga class — which I could only summon myself awake to attend on the strength of yesterday’s prolonged nap — I was mentally blogging instead of putting all my focus on breathing, opening, and blotting rivulets of forehead sweat before my tweezed-puny eyebrows were breached. An entire blog post, inspired by the teacher’s faux-profound comments that were made as we reposed in half-pigeon pose. “All my friends complain to me about how they hate sending Christmas cards,” she said. “And then yesterday, I open my mailbox and find it jammed with cards from all my friends who tell me they hate sending Christmas cards!”
An amusing anecdote that garnered a few titters from those of us who weren’t grimacing from hip-wrenching pain. But she didn’t carry the story to its logical conclusion: We fill our days with things we don’t really want to do. I should be blogging, everyday I should be blogging, but nobody wants to open a mailbox to find Christmas cards that nobody wanted to send, and nobody wants to read a blog filled with posts that nobody wanted to write.
