Centenary

100.

One hundred.

This is my 100th post.

One hundred is one of those weird numbers; it feels like a lot, but it also feels like a drop in the bucket. One hundred cupcakes? That’s a whole bunch of cupcakes. $100 towards the downpayment on a house? Peanuts! Hardly worth mentioning!

One hundred people in line ahead of you at the coffee shop? Too many!

One hundred sprinkles on your ice cream cone? Not enough!

One hundred bottles of beer on the wall? Please don’t sing that song.

Once per week, for one hundred weeks, I’ve poked you on a Thursday morning to drone on about something completely inane. I’m honestly surprised I’ve managed to keep it up this long. Usually I am very much one of those people who gets excited at the prospect of a shiny new thing, keeps being excited about it for exactly half an hour, and then gets distracted by a butterfly and moves on to something else entirely. It was worse when I was a child--ask my mother. She is the queen of finishing one thing before moving on to the next, and my utter inability to finish much of anything besides my dinner was a constant source of consternation to her. I remember plenty of arguments stemming from half-finished projects lying around cluttering up the house. I also remember having delusions of grandeur about creative projects I was planning to undertake, enormous book sagas I was going to write--nine-year-old me had ideas, man. But did any of them ever come to fruition?

Pft.

I’ve certainly improved in this sector. I’ve developed my ‘follow-through’ muscles, if you will. There are far fewer artistic endeavors languishing half-finished in my ‘Bin of Good Ideas’* these days. Most of the stories I start writing get endings. Most of the artsy-crafty doo-dahs I undertake end up on someone’s wall rather than under my bed covered in dust.

I’m not perfect, but I try.

At this point in the post I ought to switch gears and do something meaningful with the number 100. ‘100 Things I’ve Learned Writing This Blog’, or ‘100 Things I’m Going To Write About In My Next 100 Posts’.

Unfortunately I’m not that cerebral.

If you haven’t worked it out by now, 100 posts in, I’m far more likely to err on the side of irreverent, and even more likely to opt for irrelevant. It’s just how I do. Part of me wonders if at this point perhaps I’ve run out of fodder for my weekly verbal assault on your innocent gray matter. It certainly feels like it some weeks. That’s leading me to wonder if I ought to take a temporary hiatus, or possibly give the whole thing up and re-channel my energies into something else. There’s no point in beating a dead horse, right? If the numbers are anything to go by, I’ve become less interesting as time has passed. (Yes, I’m weird like that. I take averages. I compare month over month. I may or may not have a spreadsheet. Shush.)

The other part of me thinks perhaps I ought to persevere. Push through. Onwards, onwards, to victory, et-Shakespearian-king-character-cetera. Plateaus aren’t forever. Then again, they might be. I’m not a geological metaphor expert. If I choose to proceed, what am I gaining? What, if anything, am I losing? Am I stopping because this has come to its natural end, or just because it’s getting harder to think of things to drone about and I’m just getting lazy?

I’m sure my editor would be thrilled to get half an hour back every week. I mean, who wouldn’t? Let’s face it. Voluntarily editing someone else’s self-referential ramblings holds about as much appeal as doing a sniff-test on a pair of socks you may or may not have worn two days ago. At best, the socks are clean--you move a couple of commas around and call it finished. At worst, you forgot that not only did you wear the socks, but wore them to the gym--the whole post is a Grade A disaster and you have to tear it apart. An editor’s nightmare.

Be kind to your editors, folks. Don’t give them stinky socks to work with.

But I digress. Or do I? This whole thing started out as ‘an exercise in futility’, and overall I feel it’s been pretty true to that label.

So...now what?




*Cliff Faulkner, one of my professors at UC Irvine in design and theatre history, coined this phrase. Have a neat idea but can’t fit it into your current concept? Store it away in the ‘Bin of Good Ideas’ and keep it for another time. One year, a friend and I made him a physical ‘Bin of Good Ideas’ as a gift. I’m not sure he completely appreciated our literal iteration, but hey, who doesn’t need a spare Rubbermaid tub in their life?