Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Painfully earnest prose

So I put two entries into the Canada Writes twitter story contest tonight, one on my behalf, one on V’s.

Mine: “Words are like problems we never solved. Your kiss is the only thing about you that I can understand.”

V’s: “He stared. She sighed. They endured.”

You can tell I’m the English major, trying too hard. A funny post on the contest said: “Grade 11 English class called. They want their grating, painfully earnest prose back.” My own writing often seems very overly earnest to me.

But I am very tempted to turn these last 2 months of the 365-word blog slog into a twitter-length challenge instead. I never realized until this year just how very long 365 words can be. I think 140 characters are much more realistic. A tweet a day for a year – now that’s an idea. Is it too late to change?

Although truth be told, there have been many times this past year when I have intended to walk away from all social media entirely – no more email, facebook, twitter, blogs. If you want to talk to me, pick up the damn phone – or better yet, drop by.

Today I came home with Miya after picking her up at school to find a friend waiting for me in the driveway. What a lovely surprise. She came in and visited while I gave Miya dinner, then carried on her way home. That’s the way relationships should work – not by voyeuristically scrolling through random photos posted on the internet by friends of friends, or by exchanging long threads of ‘let’s get together sometime’ emails.

Sadly, life and work are what they are in this day and age and corner of the world that it would be unrealistic and perhaps almost impossible to remove myself from social media for a year - although I am very, very tempted. Maybe that could be next year’s challenge. ..

In the meantime, I want to thank all my readers for bearing with me through the ups and downs, the dull and the drunken, the inspired and the, well, not so inspired.

And if you are feeling generous – please send me a topic to write about.

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