My life is average (.com)

Before entering October, I told myself that I'd hold-off the blog posts so I could save-up some interesting stories to write a birthday-themed story e-mail to my friends. It's been over a year since I last wrote one, mainly because in place of writing short stories every couple of months I've resorted to writing even shorter blog posts every couple of weeks. I guess if you do a word count comparison on either method, it kinda balances out.

Thus explains this month's lack of blog activity; I don't wanna repeat stories both on this site and in my e-mail, but at the same time I don't really know what stories will make the final cut, so I'm hoarding everything to myself right now.

It does kinda say something about the pace of my life though: it's pretty slow. So much time between fun and exciting things that I have to take an entire month's worth of events to come-up with a decent length story e-mail.

I mean, when I was in primary and intermediate school, one of the first assignments you'd get at the beginning of the school year was to write an essay (with the word count of said essay steadily increasing with your age) about what you did over the summer break, which for us southern hemisphere folk is over December/January, so you always had a lot of material to draw from: Christmas, presents, the special meals, New Year's, visits to/from (extended) family which often meant going overseas... you get the idea.

Christmas tree
Still an exciting time of year, although I'm the one playing Santa nowadays

Of course, when I was younger, everything was exciting and worth telling the world (or your teacher and friends) about. Nowadays, being all grown-up means that you fall into a routine, and things that form a part of the routine aren't always worth telling others about.

In my own efforts to keep the happenings of the grown-up world just above the threshold of boredom, I keep a running thought at the back of my mind to try mix things up at the most mundane of times, eg: thinking with my stomach, writing "hilarity ensues" in my bug reports, spinning in my chair... little things to remind myself and others that it doesn't have to be "same shit different day" all the time.

But it's not my everyday life which will make it into my story e-mail - I doubt my friends want to read about me installing large software packages over the course of a day again. Nor do I think they want to read things like:

Today, I heard quacking from the street. I looked outside my window and saw a lone female duck walking along the grassy part of the footpath of our street. In spring, you usually see ducks paired-up, so I wondered where the male duck was. The thought bothered me for the rest of the afternoon.

My life is average.