A Different Kind of Anniversary

Human beings are funny when it comes to the passage of time. We love to make sure to remember it, always living in the past. Seconds, minutes, hours, months, years and so on. And we’re never too quick to point out an anniversary, a small moment when the calendar lines itself up again to a time when something began or ceased or started again. Most of the anniversaries that make up our everyday lives go unnoticed, uncelebrated and are left to drift through the space-time continuum without recognition. I tied my shoes for the first time 33 years ago, or today marks the anniversary of the first time I was able to make my tongue in the shape of a taco. Good times...but who remembers them?

I guess me, because I'm like that. I love calendars, anniversaries and dates. I spend an inordinate amount of time on those "Today in history" websites, and the information only seems to help in Jeopardy! when no one's around, of course.

To come to my point, today is the one year anniversary of beginning my blog. Nothing special to write home about, but I’ve been stuffing my thoughts, ascertains and asinine quibbles down the throats of my friends and family for 365 days now, and frankly, I’m surprised I still have friends and family left that are speaking to me after some of the things I've said. No men in white coats, thought police knocking on my door or dirty looks from strangers to validate my efforts though. That’s probably because only a handful of people actual bother to read them, and that’s fine by me, I guess. I don’t do this for recognition, just as a way to vent my frustration, share my insanity or launch my beliefs into the stratosphere, and I'd just assume that nobody is reading it anyway because then I start writing for an audience with specific expectations instead of for my own well being.

However it turned out, I sure wrote a damn lot, didn’t I? But just how much, you ask? How much have I forced you to suffer through over this first year? I’m sure my mother is quite aware, as she prints out each post and puts it in a notebook for posterity, but I was much surprised at the number of words I strung together… mostly for no reason what so ever.

In the last year, I wrote (up until this exactly apt word: procrastination), 264,255 words in 187 posts, filling 733 paragraphs that would span 726 pages of text and pictures, amounting to 1,419,258 letters and characters (For example, I hit the space bar 266,685 times). I wrote, on the average, 724 words each day for a solid year (but the average post is 1,413 words long)—which doesn’t sound all that impressive until I think about how much money I would have made if I was getting my standard freelance rate for these (at 30 cents a word, you do the math… okay, don’t. It’s 80 grand).

I guess I’m sort of glad I don't get paid for it… that’s a lot of extra cash to explain to the IRS, and you know what bastards I think they are.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy whatever zaniness I come up with for this next year.