Laziness, Procrastination ... you know.

Well, here it is. February, 2009. The last time I wrote a blog was before Halloween. Disgraceful.

The thing is, I love writing this blog. I love it. And yet I still fell off the bandwagon. How did that happen?

I guess I could throw all of my excuses out there. The school play was in full swing and it was consuming all of my free time. I was navigating a new relationship after three years of stolid independence and general bolshiness. It was the lead up to Christmas. There were some health issues in my family.

All of those reasons are valid to a degree, I suppose. And every time I thought I that I had a great idea for a blog I would get caught up in something else, the moment would pass, and I would find myself unable to write. But, excuses aside, I know that the truth is that sustaining anything, even something you LOVE, takes some pretty solid commitment and effort.

This is something that I have only realized in my adulthood, I think. I guess it comes with the realization that the things you love involve one or more of the following: time, money, energy. As I get older, I realize in a way that I didn't as a child, that all of these are things are finite, and a lot of them get used up while you are working.

Take reading, for instance. I love reading. I'm an English teacher for crying out loud. But I buy wayyyyyyyyy more books than I have time to read. It's ridiculous. My shelves are groaning under the weight of books that I look at and think "I'm going to read two of you this weekend! Get ready, books!" And I start the books, but I never finish even one in a weekend anymore - it often takes weeks of snatched paragraphs on the subway or right before bed before I finally hit the denoument. I'm so grateful to my book club because a) it forces me to read books I wouldn't necessarily pick up on my own and b) it keeps me to a deadline. And I need it; Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy is a whopping 1474 pages, true, but that doesn't excuse the fact that I have been reading it off and on for nearly a year. When I was in high school I read Steven King's 1134-page behemoth The Stand in three weeks.

I'm never more aware of the effort needed to keep up things that are important to you than I am when I am at the gym. Any gymgoer knows that this is the worst time of year at the gym because it is suddenly overrun with people my brother refers to as the "resolutionists." The resolutionists, of course, are the people who haven't moved since Hoobastank had their "hit" (note the sarcastic quotations marks) and decide in January that "this is the year for fitness!" and off they dash to clog up the cardio machines and hog the free weights. I won't lie; my resolve to work out is often stronger in January too. But as we all huff and puff on our treadmills like a group of marathoners who will never reach the finish line, I think of myself running joyfully as a child; not for fitness or thigh reduction but because it was the best way to get where I wanted to be. Or because I had the energy to burn. Now, despite the fact that I love how I feel when I come home from the gym, it still feels a bit like a second job.

But that's the thing about growing up, I guess. When you're a kid you don't see that you can freely indulge in the things you love because of the amount of time you have, the fact that you're not paying for your own food and hydro and dental work, and because someone is usually around to drive you to where your fun happens to be located. When you grow up, you see that your fun takes commitment and effort, and it's not always fun in the process, but hopefully, you'll find that the end result is worth the commitment.

This is a long way of saying that I felt so busy and stressed that I thought my creativity had dried up, and before I knew it, months had passed and my blog remained unchanged. But it wasn't really about my creativity - I just got overwhelmed and lazy. So, you know ... sorry about that. The truth of the matter is that I could have been writing this whole time if I had turned the damn TV off now and again. But I'm back on the wagon now, I promise. And I've even got a few ideas for future blogs ... ready? I'm sharing them with my 1.2 readers now (if you're even still here) so you can keep me honest.

I'm going to tell you about the bike ride that is going to kill me. I'm not joking about this - I think that this bike ride might actually end my life. I'm also going to tell you about how I think that the decline of western civilisation is directly related to the decline in the use of consonants in everyday speech. I'm also going to tell you about how becoming a condo owner is like joining a cult, but with less moral relevance.

So get ready ... 'cause I got some crabbin' to do.

A