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I decided it would be good discipline for me to do NaBloPoMo, so here I am, attempting to blog every day in November. If I were more ambitious, I'd do NaNoWriMo, but I'm not, and anyway I have another project on my plate that I'll blog about if it actually comes to fruition. Maybe next year, or sometime after. I did always want to be a novelist.

Well, speaking of. I am reminded occasionally, by glances at my high school yearbook or stacks of old notebooks or my college transcript that mentioned something about being an English major, hmmm...for a long time I wanted to be a writer. And of course, writing requires some of the aforementioned discipline (which I lack, as my dissertation bears out, if it could bear out anything by not really existing), as well as having something to write about. I caught myself in the driveway, toward the end of our first long New England winter here, thinking the tautological thought, "I'm much happier now that I'm happy," which is true in a way that goes beyond the obvious. For most of my teenage and adult life, until I met Justin, I fancied that I had a real or affected melancholy that I believed to be the hallmark and the catalyst of a true artist, the thing that made me sad but also made me a poet, or a novelist, or whatever. I was sad, but I reveled in my sadness, and it gave me a lot to blather about and analyze to death. Life (i.e. love, because that's really what this is all about) is so simple now that I've long left overanalysis behind. It is no coincidence that I kept a very detailed diary of my trip to Italy in 2002 until the moment Justin and I started dating, or that my habit of keeping a diary or some sort of computer log of my thoughts, or even writing lengthy emails to faraway friends about my life, largely evaporated after that point.

And I am happy. Life is so emotionally uncomplicated. There is nothing to analyze with Justin, because he's the most candid person I know, and Auletta doesn't give me time to brood anyway. I don't feel as though I need an outlet for stewing passions. But I don't write.

This doesn't mean I can't write, though, and I'm thinking maybe I should get myself in the habit of writing, just to see if I have something to say, and maybe I will find I am still a poet or a novelist--not to mention I take myself a lot less seriously than I did in my early 20s, so that's got to help, right? There is nothing riding on this now. If I can write, I'll write, and if I can't, there is a lot else for me to do. And hence, the first day of NaBloPoMo.