Reflection

So maybe it's the (crappy) weather, or maybe it's just my mood, but I've been reading through an old blog (2006-2007) tonight and it actually surprised me that my writing back then wasn't total garbage. That going back and looking at it, I'm kind of pleased with some of the things I said and the ideas I wrote about. I'm especially intrigued by the records I made of my dreams on a fairly regular basis. They were all quite interesting and lovely (even when they were horrific) and of course by now they are completely vanished from my memory.

I want to write again. As evidenced by this blog, I have a very difficult time doing so consistently. This is supported by the sporadic nature of other blogs and journals I've written, scattered about the internet in the past (oh my God has it been that long?) nine years or so. I started my first on LiveJournal in 2001, not long before I graduated high school. That journal was mostly abandoned by 2004 though I continued to make occasional posts (announcing the wedding and stuff like that) through 2007. From 2006 to 2007 I wrote on Vox, and then abandoned the whole blogging thing again until early 2008, when I started making posts here. And I've made all of...ten? posts in the past two years, so I can't say that I've spent a lot of time working on that "writing" thing lately. Reading, yes, as always, and I'll probably keep writing about reading because I feel like it gives me a direction when there's not always anything else to say.

Lent is upon us. I mentioned this to my husband upon seeing some very strange European Carnival pictures today and he mentioned that he felt like he should do something. I reminded him that it involved giving up something you liked, or a vice--not necessarily something bad for you, and now I'm thinking. I wonder if I can "give up" laziness and maybe kick this depression (hello SAD, nice to see you--again!)...writing isn't easy, and doing it every day is especially not easy. And laziness is certainly a bad habit that I could be rid of happily. The SAD is particularly on my mind right now--until I searched for "Lent" on Wikipedia just now, I swear to you that my Google search bar had "pictures of sunny days" in it because I was searching for any sliver of sunshine to brighten up my evening. There's no official diagnosis here or anything but the two feet of snow outside, constant snowy days, and half of February crossed off on the calendar all point that direction.

How long does it take to make a habit? Forty days sounds like a good start. And even if I think this is all crap now, well, firstly--there's pretty much no one reading it. Second, there's a decent chance that I might come back to it in a couple of years and think, hey, that's not so bad after all...