LaurieWrites: NaBloPoMo My Heart

If you can sing that subject line to the appropriate tune, we are soulmates.

ANYWAY. Happy November, freaks and geeks. October sucked, so in order to kick off this brand new month and our collective descent into seasonal affective disorder the absolute old school way around this blog, I decided to join a surprising number of my allegedly internet-jaded friends and try NaBloPoMo again. (That's the BlogHer link to sign up, right there. I understand there are prizes.)

Yes, the kinda-sorta-acronym (is it an acronym if there are extra letters, as in not just one per word? These are the things that keep me from solving the world's problems, these questions.) that everyone loves to make fun of and turn into other things that aren't "Blo", except for when it suits their double entendre-ish needs.

Can you believe we are here again? I had occasion to look at my archives today because I was NOT AWASH IN DESPAIR AT ALL but doing something really important, believe me, and it occurred to me that next time April rolls around I'll have been doing this thing for eight years. Eight years. Eight.

Do not ask me about 2005.

I don't know how many times I've attempted NaBloPoMo. I got desperate and wrote a retrospective of "NaBloPoMos Past" in 2009 that made me laugh. I've written good things under November blog pressure, and I've written posts appropriately titled Failing NaBloPoMo Five. I wrote this on All Soul's Day in 2009 for my grandmother, and reading it reminds me of that time, but also that the way I grieved her was writing through it. I think in some ways it made it so much better for me, although there are still days where I can't believe she's gone. And that was the year I finished, per this post, called NaBloPoDone. Do you all remember when I had highlights? Or when I made faces like this? Because I almost don't.

2009 was apparently the year I threw down. Last year I didn't even bother, because things had already started to go wacky around here, honestly. This year I don't know what will happen, but why not? The past two months have been, honestly, not so great. A little dark. Challenging. And a lot of it is stuff I really can't or don't choose to write about for annoying grown-up sorts of reasons, which is turning out to be a bit of a problem for my processing, as it were.

But today was the first workable day in awhile. I will cautiously say that things may be starting to turn around a little, a thought I'm cramming into the part of my brain that isn't occupied by all of the people so affected on my coast by these terrible storms, whose lives have been so horribly disrupted, and in some cases ended, by a force that honestly cannot be controlled.

I've been thinking a lot about fragility this week, and strength, no matter what. I just keep watching what's unfolding, and hoping for the best for everyone.

There are good things this month, definitely. There's an election, so I hear, and although I may need to be sent to my room with a hot toddy and my blankie because I'm not sure I can tolerate watching the returns without some kind of sedative, I'm ready for that to be over so we can move on. I am alternately optimistic and panicked, and I pray we make the right choices, on lots of counts.

I will also be headed to California in a couple of weeks for Camp Mighty, and celebrating Thanksgiving with my family, so I'll have lots to write about here, even if only thirty percent of it is bloggable.

So. NaBloPoMo. I'll give it a shot, again. Happy November, and adios, October. It was you, and me.