Day 17: I faked it

This is a milestone of sorts for me:  It's my 400th blog.  Woohooo!  

Now this might not seem like a lot, especially to people who write things like "Hey, my cat just threw up on my carpet!" or "Screw it, it's been a hard day, I'm going to have some wine and watch car chases and zombies on Netflix." as blogs.  

My blogs, are far from that.  Typically they are wordy.  Maybe a bit too wordy for a lot of people. I used to refer to my blog as a "blogumn" instead of a "column" as I first started writing blogs back in March 2006 at the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper here in town hoping to get a job out of it.  But, if you were reading these blogs this month, you'll know that already.  Didn't happen.  Still hoping that maybe one day someone will see these online and give me the opportunity to write something...anything...and pay me a pittance for the pleasure.

In my mind, I like to believe they are short stories...very short stories. A slice of my life hopefully buttered with enough syllables in the correct order, to make it somehow apply to your life as well.  If I can relate one of these "stories" to your life, in any way, and you think, "Hey, I thought that before!" or "Hey...that's happened to me countless times!" or "Oh...geez...I do that, too." then my job has been done.  If I can make you say, "Wow...I never really thought of that this way before...this is interesting!" then my job has just begun.

I hope one day to write a book...I've wanted to do just that since I was a small kid.  When I was little, my mother always told me to write children's books. "Mariann", she would say, (it would have been stupid for her to call me 'Bob" or "Jimmy") "Why don't you write some books for children? That's where all the money's at."  And I always thought she had no clue - this was well before all those "Goosebumps", "Harry Potter", and "Twilight" books. A LONG time before. But, damned if she wasn't right after all...that IS where the big money is.  And that's probably where I'd get the most satisfaction.  

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for adults to love my books and include my works in those "high school reading lists" - up there with all the classics and other books you dread reading over the summer. But to be able to get a child enthused enough to be glued to my book, or a series of them, like J.K. Rowling did?  Absolutely fantastic! At the end of the day, when all is read and done, I think that might actually give me the most satisfaction.  

I don't know if I'll have ever a career as a novelist, seems everyone nowadays knows someone personally (at least online) who has written a book.  Anyone can write a book.  My cats can write a book...the key to writing a good one is "to put the words in the right order."  

If and when I figure out how to do that, you'll know -- oh, you'll know for certain.  I'll be the extremely happy one walking around with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. And, when I'm not skipping, I'll have a glass of wine in my hand. And, I'll be soooooo rich someone else can clean up the cat vomit from the carpets...hell, what am I thinking here?  I'm rich! I can buy all new carpets every time they do it!

Until then...that smile on my face and that skip in my step?  I faked it.  The wine, however, is real...and it's in one of those fancy "wine-specific" Riedel glasses.  I have a bunch of them...and they honestly work...wine does taste differently in one glass vs another.  Let me elaborate a little...

Ugh...sorry...gotta cut this short...one of my cats is hacking up a hairball or something right now in the other room.  Ugh!  Ugh!  She's right underneath the piano, too, right where I can't get to her.  Ugh...this is always fun.

Anyway, go on over to "We Work For Cheese" to see what the other writers are coming up for "I'm faking it" today, Day 17, of the "30 Minus 2 Days of Writing" blogging workshop.

The Time Is NYE

Well, my "New Year" has come and gone. And it has with about as much fanfare as all my previous ones. Oh, I know I've said it before (I've been doing these blogs for ages here now - so I have a backlog of archives and a backlog of laments, joyousness, and just plain "the way I see it" insights of the 'common man' who just happens to be a woman) but I wish one day to actually GO OUT to celebrate the new year being rung in.

I don't have to go to Times Square - I prefer a place with a bathroom anyway. I don't have to be wined and dined on some ocean cruise or being flown to Australia to herald in the first new year. I would just like, once, to be able to go to a place where they hand you chintzy hats and noisemakers which make kazoos seem wondrous in comparison. I just want to celebrate.

I was online "celebrating" this time around. I had friends call me - I called friends - I liked the fact that people actually took time out of their lives to talk to me at (and around) the stroke of midnite. I had my champagne in my oh-so-special Riedel champagne flute - with its steady stream of bubbles percolating from the bottom because that's what the Riedel people get the big bucks for...for convincing me that bubbles coming up from an etched "X" at the bottom of my glass is more special than "the others" - which don't sport this X-factor bubble phenomenon. Heh...they were free at a Riedel wine-tasting and most people left without claiming their champagne glasses...and me, due to my having absolutely no problem swiping glasses off tables which people left behind...got quite a nice set of these.

But I digress yet again - no - no resolutions to stop digressing. I like to digress.

Did anyone else notice how incredibly banal the NYE television shows are now? I have no idea who half these people are who host them - but I know I can do at least twice as good as they do - and at one-third the pay. There's some mathematical formula in there I'm sure - but, regardless - you don't need to know what X is - to know the shows were worse than ever. And there were more product placements in the Times Square celebration than lights in that NYE ball which I totally missed. My cable decided to give me the multi-coloured test pattern stripes a couple minutes before the Waterford crystal ball, which still reminds me of my sagging bustline, dropped. I have no idea why it did that...but it did - that's right up there with that "Emergency Broadcasting Test Signal Interruption" bit which always seems to occur around 2:00 a.m. when I'm watching some classic film on TCM. I seriously doubt it ever happens during product placement spots when "General Hospital" or "The Price Is Right" is on...but at 2:00 a.m. (somewhere between the advent of the Hays Act and those product placement paydays) it never fails to rear its ugly head. I just wish it would have shown up earlier during that New Year's Eve show with Carson Daly and the brain-dead chick whose name escapes me for just that reason.

Anyway, at least the Sci-Fi channel had the good sense to show a Twilight Zone marathon which is still going on as I write this. Show after show of imaginative creativity with absolutely no product placement whatsoever (yeah, one more reference to it won't hurt)...how did they ever manage to churn this stuff out episode after episode, year after year...while in the here and now, ringing in 2009, NBC felt compelled to air a plethora of less than mediocre fare - attempting to pawn it off as entertainment. Yes, indeedy...someone sure dropped a whole other ball on that one.

Perhaps next year I'll actually be OFF this sofa celebrating and being able to write a whole blog devoted entirely to the ridiculousness of spending X amount of dollars only to get a plastic glass of cheap champagne, a lopsided hat and some slowly deflating balloons to take home to the kids.

So I'll raise my glass and tip my imaginary lopsided hat to 2009...here's hoping we all have a little less to complain about and a little more to celebrate in the coming year. Or, at the very least - more trivial things to complain about and more momentous things to celebrate.