Projects 365…

Project no longer looks or sounds like a real word.

Every year when January 1st rolls around and people start talking about resolutions and new projects and goals, my idiot brain starts to think, Maybe I should do another Project 365.

And then I have to remind myself once again, how much I did not enjoy it any of the times I’ve done it.

It starts out fine. I have my spreadsheet with my lists of daily prompts and notes to track my progress and what I was taking pictures of, and it becomes a new, daily Thing To Do. Then within a few weeks, I already hate it and want to quit, but am determined to keep going because I never finish anything creative, and dammit, I am going to DO THIS.

I’m just going to mutter expletives the entire time I’m staring at that spreadsheet trying to decide which prompt to use, and then while I’m looking for something to match that prompt, and especially when I’m scowling at the camera while taking a picture of myself.

Why do I do this?

With the 2021 project, I decided I wanted to put together a new blog space to document things. Not necessarily to share with other people but for my own archive. Because it was early in the project, once I caught up to the current day, I decided to fill in the 2017 project that never saw the light of day. And then the 2009-2010 project that already had it’s own blog space on another platform. (That I apparently never fully finished.)

I spent weeks uploading, formatting, posting, and it felt like progress and it kept the fire burning for the current project. But once I finished filling in the backlog of the old projects, that fire started to sputter out. I kept taking pictures, but stopped editing and posting them with any regularity. I downloaded them off my camera, and they sat on my hard drive taking up space and collecting dust. Once the year ended, it took a very long time before I picked it up again. I certainly thought about it a lot. As I do with any unfinished thing in my life. But it was well over a year before I started poking at it again. And even then it was slow and sporadic.

But, like the damn projects themselves, I was determined to finish this bloody website deal too.

It has been over three years in the making, but here we are.

And hopefully now that I’ve more or less “finished” this website project, I can look back at the 914 posts sitting here and remember how much I did not like doing Project 365 the next time January 1st rolls around and I start thinking, maybe I should do another one.

No.

No I should not.

And if I do, I really need to skip the daily selfie nonsense.

But I’m clearly not good at learning lessons, so we’ll see.

Maybe A Year in the Life of Jinx.

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Bulletproof Picasso Train