Happy cutting-edge twelve month session!

Ask anyone (except Kendall) and they would agree that I would be like a tortoise (and not a praying mantis) were I to compare myself to a creature that creeps the earth. Tortoise is not only a word with magnanimous spelling and awesome pronunciation, but it is also a word used to represent a creature that is slow and, according to Aesop, steady, sure to win the race. (Others may disagree and say I'm more like a giraffe for how tall I am and for the interesting tongue that I possess, but for the sake of simplicity, we'll stick with the representative slow-moving, shelled-in example for today.)

I am not really a fan of "New Year's" as a holiday... The title of this post (I put the word 'new' and then the word 'year' into my quick reference thesaurus for new and original words!) reflects my mild rebellion not to do what everyone else is doing, to post about their resolutions and what not. I am in no way scorning this practice -- au contraire! make this world a better place, one resolution at a time, please! -- it's just that I am really lame at making a list of goals and following through with them. I like to give myself good, effectual ideas and I usually pull through to complete them as they come, but a whole gob at the beginning of a year scares me, so I don't do it. I have some moderately good habits already that I know I can improve on and will. I take life as it comes, pump the future with some adequate planning, but I really just take a flexible approach that leaves room for surprises, good or unfortunate, and just keep plodding.

I have a...goal, you might say, to write a short story every month. It shouldn't be hard....well, I haven't given myself any guidelines so it will be really hard not to succeed. Is it cheating? Okay if you think so. I basically just want to finish the stories -- you know, have a beginning, middle and end -- and revise them at least once. I'm terrible at revision. That's a thing I need to accept as necessary. I'm too impatient and proud for intense revisions, but I need to humble myself and get over it.

So I'll be like a tortoise. Except my goals and I won't be racing against anyone else and their goals. We'll just keep "plodding" along, my vision and me, until...whenever. Deadlines....yeah. Lame at those, too. I usually like to work on "inner" things that just get added to my habits and don't really need deadlines or have endings. But each time I complete some planned thing or surmount some unplanned thing, I stash the little successes in my sweet shell and keep plodding ever onward. I'm tall and not all that graceful, so plodding is an apposite word for my tread, but let's hope at the eventual end of my successful race, when those waiting friends (I love you, friends, by the way, along the way, all the way) will hoist me upon their shoulders and cheer, that I'll look at least a little better than this:



Look at that face! ahaha!

Oh, and look at this real tortoise story. I love the last line: "All lame tortoises should be so lucky." I am a lame tortoise.... :)