I heard a writer say something about the value of writing for ten minutes a day just documenting the day or the previous day as you recall it so I thought I’d try that.
To get better at a thing, spend more time doing the thing, like building muscle, and also wiring the brain to be thinking about the thing. So I thought I’d try that. Will I stick to it? I don’t know. Do I have the time? Yes. Ten minutes? I have ten minutes. But it’s the discipline. I dunno, we’ll see.
So why bother? I like writing, want to be better at it, want to try to write funny things. I should read more about it, and read stuff like I want to write. That’d take more than ten minutes though... I noticed that starting this was hard. I have this stupid little pink bluetooth keyboard that I use because the built in keyboard on my laptop is dying. I kind of identify with the laptop, it’s slowly breaking down and becoming increasingly less useful and more irritating - there’s a row of keys, well a column of keys to be honest, words mean things, this column of keys has mostly but not entirely quit working, the U, J, and M keys. They’re like when I was a temp doing factory and office work, they mostly don’t work but if there’s enough repeated pressure they work just enough to avoid getting thrown out.
Anyway I got this little pink keyboard, it’s pink because I wanted to tease my daughters. When they were little they said boys couldn’t wear pink and I thought that was sexist. Not like that I care about sexism against men but more like I didn’t want my girls taking on these ideas of gender roles that were going to constrain them, so I got a pink shirt. Actually what happened is my oldest daughter said there were girl colors and boy colors and I couldn’t wear pink because it was a girl color. Blue was a girl color too. All the colors she liked were girl colors, the ugly colors were boy colors. It turns out she didn’t need me or any man to do feminism for her, she was already defining for herself what her gender would mean. But I still didn’t like the idea, plus I’m just a contrarian, so I said ‘I’m gonna get a pink shirt’ and she said ‘you can’t’ and I said ‘yes I can’ and she said ‘you can’t’ and I said well, would you like to pick out a pink shirt for me at the store? And she got excited and said yeah. So I have this pink button down shirt she picked out like ten years ago, I love it, makes me think of her. And I got this pink keyboard because it reminded me of her. Well really I thought I could use it to pick arguments with my kids or remind them of when we used to argue about that kind of stuff but it turns out it just makes me happy to think about how much I love them. Maybe whenever I want to pick an argument or reminisce with someone it’s that I love them.
So I have this pink keyboard and it’s small and I have big hands and the keyboard sits funny in my lap, floppy, unstable. I looked around for something to put under it, a pair of pants maybe (I’m typing this with no pants, just boxers, my house my rules) and then I found a pillow and put that in my lap and the keyboard on top. Which is fine except I had already started the timer before I even grabbed the keyboard. And then I needed music to listen to so it wasn’t going to be a full ten minutes, but then the timer went off and I kept going, so it’s longer than ten minutes. This isn’t a reminiscence of my day though, it’s just me explaining that I’m going to try to type ten minutes a day. Write down the day, follow tangents if I want to.
I set up a stupid little blog to keep these at. I don’t know why but thoughts at a blog feel different than thoughts on a laptop. My kid says this too, she’s 14 now and has a private blog, she recently told me. I’m so proud of her. I love her so much. I think she’s confident in my love, she’s more secure on that kind of thing than I was at her age, so I’m like ‘oh I love you so much’ and she’s like ‘thanks, I love you too’ and it’s more like matter of fact and I love that my love feels like a matter of fact to her and I want her to know I think she’s the amazingest and a big deal to me, and I think she does know and that’s not a big deal to her? I dunno. Alright that’s enough now. The point is established. Ten minutes. I might do one just recollecting today now and then call it quits. For tonight I mean. Shit I didn't even write about being distracted, I guess I got distracted.
