Just add garlic and pull gold out of the air

So, while I do enjoy making kintsugi, and have been interested, if not necessarily enjoyed, all of the challenges of developing a website (which I mostly did incorrectly until I did the intelligent thing and asked someone that was smarter than me about it) and trying to start a business around kintsugi and the concept of wabisabi, my day job is being an English professor. And breaking my streak of writing blog posts for you, oh dear reader, metamorphosed into an assignment for my students, and myself.

See below.

So, since I forgot to mention it in the assignment that I just posted in all of my classes, the writer’s name is Seth Godin.

I’ll begin by telling you my most recent unpleasant writing experience. As we all share our experiences, I hope that this helps reduce any anxiety or stress any of you have about writing. Sometimes writing just sucks in some way, and there’s not necessarily a way around it. It’s unfortunate, but every other aspect of life, even bacon, functions in the same way.

So, on a website that I’ve been developing for the past few months, there is a blog. And I’ve barely used it. I knew it might be useful someday, but I had other things to worry about with the website, other hobbies, teaching, and so on, so it just hasn’t been a priority.

But I’ve been reading a couple of Seth’s books over the past week or so, and the way he talks and thinks is pretty interesting. And I follow his blog on facebook, because I’m old enough that facebook is basically my only social media. And I had noticed that he posted something every day, but I hadn’t really thought about it. But either in a blog post or in one of the books, he mentioned how he posted every day and why he did so. Basically, to practice writing, because it’s like any other skill. If you never do it, or only do it as rarely as possible when you’re required to do it, you aren’t likely to get a lot better a lot quicker. And by writing something that was going to be posted every day, pretty much all anxiety about people’s perceptions of his writing disappeared. There would definitely be days when his writing wasn’t at its best. But, since he was going to post again the next day, that was ok. If you’ve ever cooked a meal and it wasn’t great, but it was ok, did you feel that badly about it? Probably not. You probably just ate it, thought, next time, more garlic, because that is never wrong, and then went on with your day.

And all of the writing that any of you, and I, do, for the rest of our lives will function in a fairly similar manner. Some days won’t be great. But, the more good days that you have in your practice of writing, the fewer bad days you’ll have. You’ll notice thoughtless mistakes that were easy to make when you were only writing one paper every two weeks. And, once you’ve noticed them enough times, rather than thinking, oh, clearly I’m a terrible writer, you’ll just be annoyed. Crap, why did I forget the garlic again?

And on the next day, you’ll add the garlic so you won’t make that same mistake,

Of course, one day you’ll be making jello, and while 2 heads of garlic sounds like a perfectly reasonable amount for one serving. . .

I had to take a break because I laughed too hard. And I realized, that I actually have no idea if that would work or not. I suspect that it wouldn’t, but I just have no way to tell. If anyone wants to figure out how to make garlic jello for the final, I’ll try it. It will probably be either terrible or just too weird to work, but I opened this door, so I’m willing to step through.

Hopefully you got the point I was aiming at.

So, I decided to start on Monday of last week. Writing one blog post every day. Even though I’m not really done with the site in the way that I’d like yet.

And it went reasonably well for several days, but, like any new hobby, my practice is pretty shaky and not very reliable yet.

Saturday night, halfway through writing my post, my computer locked up completely. I think I had a youtube video playing or something, nothing that should have caused problems, but, something did. And I waited a few minutes, and nothing continued to happen, and the only thing I could do was a force restart. And once it restarted, things still weren’t working very well, and this continued on for what seemed like a long time, but mostly, it was late at night, and I was tired and frustrated by technology stopping me, so I gave up and went to bed.

6 days in and I completely broke my streak.

And I was annoyed by this and felt dumb and wallowed in a relatively small amount of misery for several hours once I woke up on Sunday, and just decided that losing a streak that early on wasn’t actually a big deal. I’m at 1303 days of duolingo, and that would probably make me pretty mad if I lost that for some dumb reason. But, after thinking about it, and listening to a podcast with Seth talking about the idea of practices vs goals, I realized that having a goal of a giant streak of daily posts wasn’t actually a useful goal. Having a daily writing practice was a much more useful goal. And for any type of practice, sport, hobby, etc, if you miss a day every now and then, it’s not actually a big deal. I’m not yet enlightened enough to extend that same idea to my duolingo streak, but I’m ok with that because sukoshi nihongo ga hanasee masu. I can speak a little Japanese. I won’t guarantee that I spelled all of that correctly, but I’m reasonably close.

You will all have writing experiences and, while in school, assignments that are boring or annoying or unpleasant for some reason. I’ll be telling some of my college stories in future posts, so that you can see some ways that I was either unwise or unfortunate when I was in your position.

And a useful thing to remember, is just add the garlic.

I was hoping for a better way to turn that into a beautiful or at least funny metaphor, but, I’ll just leave that there as an example of me not doing very well at writing every time.

Also, I’m totally using this as a bit of a cheat as all of the above, plus another paragraph or two, will be my blog post for today hahaha.