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It was a bad Thanksgiving dinner but not because the turkey was dry or because any of the other food was sub par.

I was the reason it was bad or rather it was my bad attitude and bad mood.

This year I didn’t want to do anything or be a part of any sort of celebration because I didn’t feel like I had anything to celebrate. Doesn’t mean I am not grateful for my health and for those I love because I am but this year it wasn’t enough to keep my frustration from spilling over a bit.

Job interviews have come and gone, some have resulted in definitive no’s and others have not said one way or another but the long silence between conversations doesn’t lend itself to optimism.

Dancing on the razor’s edge has become a way of life for me and though I have become adept at finding ways to avoid serious injury it doesn’t mean I haven’t suffered from a thousand tiny paper cuts nor does it mean I have cried about them either.

I have accepted what I could and done my best to just roll with whatever has come my way but that doesn’t provide me with much patience and the internal stores are almost all depleted.

That is probably why when the independently wealthy who had the good fortune to marry into money and or inherit very successful businesses made me so angry.

I couldn’t listen to them complain about hard lives because when money is the cure for what ails you and you have ample supply it is hard for me to feel badly.

It Is More Than Just Bad Timing

This post was going to be called Write Under The Write Conditions and it was going to be about writing but I decided to save it.

Decided to save it because I want it to run when it has a chance to get a little more play and see a bit more sunshine than is likely to come at almost midnight on the Friday night of Thanksgiving weekend.

****

Got a bottle of Scotch and a new cellphone eyeballing me. Tempted to pour more than a snort, grab my headphones and phone and take a few quiet moments to do nothing.

But I promised to participate in the daily posting required of Naboplomo so I can’t stop for the drink or to grab that single piece of pumpkin pie that is taunting me from the refrigerator.

The Beatles are singing “Once there was a way to get back home” and I am thinking about how much I relate to that, but mostly in an optimistic way.

I wrote earlier this week or last about how I miss having a home. It is not because I am homeless because I am not now nor have I ever been such.

But I haven’t lived in a place that I though of as being mine in a long time. Every where I have been has been a stop on a way to something better. Maybe it is tied into the storm I wrote about here.

Frankly the hardest part about this particular storm isn’t the length as much as it is the dust it has stirred up. Got me thinking long and hard about multiple choices and decisions in ways that aren’t particularly helpful nor useful.

Got me wondering how I could have been stupid so many times, but when I take a deep breath it is clear that I wasn’t…most of the time.

There are one or two things where I can concede they weren’t the smartest choices but when I am fair to myself it is clear that some of the criticism is unfair.

I did the best I could given the information I had and some of what happened truly had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t responsible for deregulation or for the crash in 2008.

Wasn’t responsible for banks losing their minds or bosses who thought it was better to cut their employees compensation because it enabled them to maintain their lifestyles.

I could have taken a different path than I did and have. Could have walked a more common road and put myself in a position to have better handled the hard moments of this storm but I didn’t.

Didn’t become an attorney like I had intended or take some other positions that would have paid more than some of what I have done.

Spent most of my life doing things my way, even when I was going along with the crowd I was still doing it my way because it is all I know how to do/be.

There are moments when I remind myself that I am who I am by choice and that I am accountable for all that I have or don’t have. Moments where I accuse my ‘do things my way’ nature as being an excuse for being a fuck up but I don’t really believe I am.

Even when I am most frustrated, most upset and most nervous I never believe that.

I am just a storm walker searching for the eye of the storm. I have found it before and I’ll find it again.

When I do things will improve and life will be different than it is now.

But if I win the lottery, inherit mega millions or make it all on my own I hope I am never as jaded or as obnoxious as the people I heard the other night. I am sure they meant well but it just chapped my hide and the reason for it was more than just bad timing.

There were three priests, five rabbis and a Buddhist monk and myself standing at the bar in Downtown Los Angeles. We were gathered for the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown and the bar made for a nice place to hang out in between sessions.

It might sound like an odd sort of combination to you, but social media is being used by everyone these days so it made sense for us to schedule a chance to talk about the most effective tools and platforms for the various clergymen to use to look after their respective flocks.

All of that made perfect sense to me. What I couldn’t reconcile was how my ex girlfriend had also dated not just one, but two of the priests. Of course back then the “fathers” hadn’t been pledged to god, but that wasn’t what threw me. What I couldn’t figure out was how I fit in the equation.

How did a nice Jewish girl turn two nice Catholic boys into priests and not have any impact upon me. During two years of dating I might have called out the lord’s name once or twice but it was never tied into a thought about becoming a rabbi.

The Post Really Starts Here

If you have made it this far I must confess that I made up the part about theInterfaith Social Media Smackdown and virtually everything that goes with it.

What I didn’t make up is having spent time in bars with some rabbis and that is because I have friends who are rabbis, but we are not going to talk about that now.

Rather we are going to spend a few moments talking about what happens when you get bored with blogging. It is far more common than many people might realize.

Causes

There are multiple causes for boredom in blogging but I would suspect that most of the time it happens for one of the following reasons:

1. You don’t know why you are blogging and consequently you are sort of wandering around the blogosphere without much purpose.
2. You have pigeonholed yourself into one niche and reached a point where you can’t come up with new material.

Blogging can be a grind. This is a marathon and not a sprint. The best and most successful bloggers are almost always those who able to sustain their efforts over the long haul.

When you lock yourself into only writing about one small niche and are afraid or unwilling to move from it you have to work harder to maintain your interest level. It doesn’t matter how much you love writing about the great woolly weevil and it’s exceptional weaving because sooner or later you’ll reach saturation and feel like you have said almost all there is to say.

Boredom Is Bad For Your Blog

Boredom is bad for your blog because it impacts your writing and your readers suffer. You won’t always hit a home run with every post but boredom will make it much harder to get a hit.

Part of the reason I mix things up here and get “creative” with headlines is because it helps prevent boredom and because I am ever curious to see what impact my words have.

Sometimes I stir it up just to see who responds to things like How To Use Your Oral Skills To Please Others. A while back I wrote a post called 69 Reasons Why Fathers Make Better Lovers and got a boatload of traffic and emails from it.

It was real engagement and many of the conversations were about social media. I found it to be interesting.

But Does It Add Value

I have to tell you I hate reading 1,933,432 posts about your content must always add value. You must always educate your reader or make them laugh, blah, blah, blah.

I hate it because it leads to sterile posts that have no passion or personality. Sometimes you have to shuck that aside and suggest that the reason the person you are writing about is so uptight is because they haven’t been laid properly in a decade.

Sometimes you need to ask your reader to imagine their grandparents having sex because you need to wake them up. It is not done to disgust them. It is done to make them wake up because they have just read 1,933,432 posts about how to be a better blogger and they are bored.

The Bottom Line

To me the bottom line is simple, have fun. If you have fun with blogging it will come out in your posts and your comments. This is a good thing.

People want to see your personality and to feel your passion. They like being around happy people. Any time you can make people smile and feel good you are providing value that is immeasurable and important.

And now I have to go think about writing more about the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown because that has real potential.

Almost midnight and an old buddy and I are catching up. He asks me about the job search and I fill him in on things. When I ask about what is new on his end he tells me about the girlfriend, the job and how happy he is to have his daughter back home.
We shoot the breeze, share a couple more stories and then laugh about how we are too young to be considered old people and too old to be considered young people.

I ask him if he remembers his view of the world when we were in high school and if reality matches it and he says “This Isn’t How I Planned It.”

We both laugh and I tell him that I am going to use that line for the title of my biography. “If I make real money from it I’ll give you some of the royalties, all $5 bucks worth.

He tells me he has to catch a few hours of sleep and I tell him he is getting older and he laughs, “you are older than I am.” It is true, I am one month older and after more than 30 years of friendship I say I have earned it.

“I don’t know what that means but ok.”

I tell him I don’t know what it means either and then ask him he understands the Sprint commercials that talk about the framily. When he says no I tell him I haven’t a clue either but suggest we might be able to make money off of producing shit that no one understands.

“We’ll call it high art and the hoity-toity fancy crowd will spend a fortune on buying some piece of artwork they can describe to friends as showing the meaning of life.”

We both laugh at the idea and then say goodnight.

This Isn’t How I Planned It

Life is different than how I planned it to be. Some of the differences are not bad things. Some of them are very good things and I am grateful but my ledger isn’t filled with a steady and rising black line.

There are some red marks and while there are days where I will tell you I am grateful for the hard times because they help me appreciate the good there are days I won’t.

Days where if you ask I will tell you I am tired of feeling like I have to do it all on my own. Days where I wonder when I will feel like I have real support and can trust people to help.

I am frustrated by some people and with some things. That is not unusual or unnatural. It happens to everyone and while I could list my complaints about some I see no upside to doing any of that.

If you ask me to tell you what I want I can give you a detailed answer and I can tell you about the roadmap I have built and am building to get me there.

FWIW, I am not likely to just share it with you. Some of those things come from the darker corners of my mind. That doesn’t mean they are bad rather it means they are personal and there are boundaries in blogging.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

It is Friday morning and I am asking myself why I didn’t post this yesterday. Don’t have any answer other than I didn’t like it enough to post as it was and didn’t see a need to engage in major editing.

Sometimes you have to walk away from the computer. Sometimes you have to live your life by walking away from the things that aren’t working for you.

Listened to The ‘Stones sing You Can’t Always Get What You Want and nodded my head because there is truth in that song. Decided that I wanted to listen to Gimme Shelter, put it on, sat back in the chair and closed my eyes.

It is one of my favorite songs, but it has been overplayed and commercialized so I don’t listen to it as often as I used to. But there is power in it and it gets my blood pumping so I went for it.

Opened my eyes and thought again about one line from You Can’t Always Get What You Want:

But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need

I think I should send Mick and the boys a card saying thanks because looking at those words I realize it is what I have been saying to my children their entire lives.

There is a difference between accepting you can’t get what you want and not trying at all. They have heard me say many times they have to be advocates for their own lives.

Mom and dad can only help so much but the bulk of the responsibility for everything falls upon their shoulders. If you want something you need to figure out how to make it happen and if you can’t make it happen you have to figure out what the best alternative is.

My life is good but in so many ways it is very different than I would have imagined it to be. This is not how I planned it, but that doesn’t mean it can’t turn out in ways that are better than I might have dreamed.

The same is true for all people.