About the 30-Day Blog Challenge

I have to admit, I thought I'd breeze through this year's 30-Day Blog Challenge (Big Apple Edition). True, the days whizzed by, however, I found it a bit more challenging this time around writing a blog post everyday on top of having a new full-time job (no more working in pajamas) while doing other writing and editing occupations (that still let me work in my pajamas). I know I've unwittingly managed to keep my work plate full because 1) It quells the paranoia of being—gasp!—jobless, and 2) It helps me deal with the long distance away from my husband. Having a lot of work to do makes me not fixate too much on missing him. And, I do miss him a lot nevertheless, especially whenever my back and feet hurt and when I just can't seem to sleep right. Put him next to me and off I go sleeping like a baby.

So, what now?

While I really, really find the daily blogging schedule ideal, I do want to live a more enriched life offline. I've recently just started doing yoga again, so I would very much like to have some time to let my body recuperate from all the twisting and turning. In Mireille Guiliano’s book, Women, Work & The Art of Savoir Faire, she ponders the “inevitable shift in social grace to the acceptance of present-tense community sharing.” She talks about a young American couple she and her husband sat next to in a small Parisian bistro: "They were whispering to one another and clearly delighted with the food and experience. Just after they finished their meals, on some silent command they both whipped out their smartphones and for a good five minutes sat in the middle of the restaurant with screens twelve inches from their eyes, reading, texting, and emailing away with intense concentration and frozen faces from faraway places." She further writes, "It points to an inability to live in and savor the moment unless it is externally recorded… abstracting and distancing it.”

That said, I still do want to keep blogging on a regular basis somehow, some way. It's true that writing is a muscle—and it's the same thing with chefs, athletes, pole dancers… To paraphrase Chelsea Handler from an episode of her show I'd seen a while back, "If you pole-dance often enough, you get better and better at it.” Same goes with writing.