Day 1- A Reader's Guide

To begin with, I need to clarify a few things. Set some parameters, if you will:

1. This blog is for me. Any readers and/or regular followers are appreciated. But I have no intention of trying to please any particular individual or group of people. I welcome any comments, and will more than likely respond to many of them, but debate is not a strength of mine, nor what I consider an enjoyable past time. If I offend anyone, I apologize ahead of time, as it was certainly not my goal. I'm just trying to get my thoughts out.

2. Regarding those thoughts of mine- I ramble. Ask any of my friends or family members. I'm famous for my 5-minute-long voice messages. I guess I just feel the need to cover all my bases before actually getting to the point. I've tried to curb that habit. It hasn't worked. I can almost guarantee that every posting of mine will begin as a short idea I just wanted to throw out there, and by the time I'm done will be a full-on short story covering everything from why I didn't have time for breakfast that day to my brother's girlfriend's theory on whether the moon landing was for real or not. Some days I'll probably be boring as hell. Others, not so much.

3. All that being said- I guess I should explain the few reasons I have for starting this blog in the first place. So now we come to the second set of bullet points. (In addition to rambling, I love being organized. I don't always succeed. But whatever. How those 2 go hand-in-hand, I'm not sure.)

• I've never been able to keep a diary. I can definitely see all the benefits in keeping them. I think part of the reason I've failed in the past is that since I ramble, my diary entries always tend to be pages and pages long. And my hand ends up hurting, so I give up after 1 day. I'm a much faster typist than writer, so we'll see if this helps. I know web pages and blog entries aren't exactly as mysterious or romantic as dusty old journals, but it's a start. (And yes- I do daydream of my great-grand-children one day running across my diaries and ooh-ing and ah-ing over all my adventures, or trying to solve some murder with them, and I do count that as one of the advantages of keeping a diary.) I'm challenging myself to keep this up for a year. Hence the "A Year in the Life of" part of my blog title. If it goes past that, I'll probably change the name.
• Like pretty much everyone else, there are several things about myself I would like to change or improve upon. I don't think I'm some awful human being or anything. I think I'm actually a very nice, sometimes funny, generally intelligent person and have no desire to change anything about my innate character. But there are somethings like changing my eating/exercise habits for the better, improving my budget, etc. that I should be better about by now, that I'm not. And I've come to the conclusion that the combination of all of these personal shortcomings might be part of the reason that I feel I'm failing at "being an adult." Granted, this is just a theory. I don't think any of my other early-to-late 20-something friends feel that they're really succeeding at that particular task either. And I'm sure they'd each have different theories as to why that is. I'd be curious to see the results of a nation-wide (heck- why not global?) survey asking people aged __ and up (when do you start? 16? 18? 21? 30?) when/if they ever truly started feeling like an adult. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there married with children that are still of the mind set "I'm not an adult. I'm not responsible or successful and I sure as heck don't know how I ended up where I am right now. How the hell do they expect me to raise a child properly!?" Anyways, this will be a place for me to document my goals for this year, as well as my successes/failures at each of those. And at the end of the year, we'll see if I've come any closer to being a responsible adult than I am now. And that should explain the last half of the title.
• Beyond those 2 overriding reasons, this is just something for me to do. A new hobby. I Facebook and Twitter on a start/stop basis. I Stumble and play computer games. I occasionally get inspired on an artistic level and break out the watercolors or oil paints or colored pencils. I also watch tv, read books, and nap a lot. You'll see when I lay out my goals for the coming months that hopefully very soon my life will be much less sedentary than that. But as my pirated cable recently got switched off, this will give me one more thing to choose from when I do find myself sitting at home.

4. And lastly, in case you haven't figured this out yet, I have no lofty overriding goal for my posts other than what I've already mentioned above. I have no political, religious or social agenda or message I'm pushing. I have no doubt those issues will pop up from time to time, but as those are the things that generally lead to heated discussions that I really have no interest in (see #1) I'll probably stay away from that for the most part.

So I guess that's about it. Now you know the what and the why. I doubt this will be a daily thing, but when I'm back next I'll give you more on the who (i.e.- a little more about me) and the when and the how (this will mostly be regarding the goals I've set for myself and trying to come up with a realistic timeline for them.) For personal and safety reasons, I'll probably keep the where a secret. But if you're cool enough to actually know me then you already have the where :P Consider yourself special.


Until then...