I’ve since forgotten all about it.  Today I saw it on Pinterest.  (I totally re-pinned it.)

Sometimes it’s nice to remember the person you were before the world got a hold of you, and to be reminded that they still occupy some space in the person you are.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday!  Guacamole?

{Image by Aaron Christopher Judd
365 Days of Tumblr: New Slide-Notes Every Day for One Year}

For the past three years, in one way or another, my life has been chronicled here for all to see.  Sometimes it’s been a raw candid.  Other times, a polished portrait only showing what I think is okay to put forth.  But for better or for worse, I’ve turned my psyche inside out on the internet, and there’s no going back now.

In so many ways, this little digital illustration of ME is cathartic and wonderful (for me).  But in so many other ways, it’s confusing and damaging.  Like, first of all — when you’re so lost you don’t know your ass from your elbow, maybe looking at the numbers on your website or your twitter feed or whatever other measurable forms of friendship you’ve entrenched yourself in in an effort to figure out who the hell you are isn’t the best way to do that. Blogland is a place of metrics and it’s easy to get lost trying to figure out if people like you, and why they like you, and how come that post got all those comments and this one didn’t, and wait, do they like her better than me? …and who’s reading and why, and from where, and WHAT DO THEY WANT FROM ME!?  (The answer, fellow bloggers, is of course nothing. If you build it, they will come.)

If you’ve been reading for a while, then you know that these questions cause me personally to have a breakdown on a quarterly basis.

But in it’s best moments – blogging is about creating a history for me and my family.  Creating a journal, a field guide, that my daughter can look back on when she’s ready to dive head first into her own adulthood.  And perhaps the greatest part of blogging?  Bloggers.  Those people who love to share and are always willing to share just a little more if you ask them to.  They’re friends and teachers and co-conspirators, and I’m honored to be able to call myself a part of this community that succeeds based on the simple idea that all boats rise together.  And they do.

Do you have a blog?  I want to read it.

Every year, I say it and I hear it: I can’t believe Christmas has come and gone already.

But this year, while August crept up on me without a freaking sound ~ the past four months have dragged on for like…an eternity.   Oh, what a long strange trip it’s been, Internet.

There are stories I tell you.  Those are my stories.  The ones I have all the proper permissions for.  And then there are the stories I’m not at liberty to share.  Some of those are also my stories.  But in those stories, I play a varied role.  In some, I am the supporting cast – there to hold up the protagonist, to provide comic relief, and to lend an ear, a shoulder, a hand.  In some of them I am neither hero nor supporting cast.  In some stories, I am something else entirely.

There are stories I share, and stories I don’t.  There are stories I tell myself, and stories I won’t even recognize as stories until the epilogue comes much, much later.  Some stories help us grow, and some stories become like shrapnel, a painful little reminder lodged in the flesh of happy memories.

But each story has a chance to become a lesson. And the most important thing I’ve learned this year is that it’s all too easy for the stories we tell in this new performance art of a life too-connected to take the focus away from the now, the present, the here.  It’s all too easy for a whole year to slip by in the blink of an eye.

Scott and I have been talking a lot lately about resolutions and what twists and turns the story of our life together will hold.  If we’re going to make them, what they should be, how we fell short in our own minds this year, and how we’d like to do better.  And I do.  This year, I want to do everything better.  But more than better, I want to do everything intentionally. Too often lately, life is so hectic, I forget to pay attention to the wonderful parts of my every day.

I want to enjoy every moment of my year.  I want to live intentionally, and love intentionally, and work intentionally.  I want to make, and savor the five minute phone calls with friends when Delilah falls asleep in the car and I can finally focus on the person on that other end. I want to luxuriate longer in the cooking of a meal for my family, or the giving of a hug to my child. I want to listen to my parents stories without wondering if I left my cell phone in the car.  I want to enjoy the joy of the writers I get to syndicate just a little more.  I want to smooth out that rough idea out just a little longer with the brilliant women I get to call friends and colleagues on this big bad internet.  And I want to fall back in love with the journey that is my career.  I want to step back and be grateful for the promise and possibility that awaits me on the other side of every studio executive’s door, every producer’s office, every set of director’s notes, rather that irritably, anxiously, gunning for the future.

The pace of the world we live in throws me for a loop on  a regular basis.  I get caught up in the inertia of it all too easily and forget to often that life is something we create, not something that happens to us.

Also, Lindsey shared this video with me a couple of days ago and I thought it was pretty funny.

Hope you and yours had a wonderful holiday.