Today’s Perfect Moment is a no-brainer. Friends and family came to celebrate my Birthday. Though it wasn’t the exact day, it was still wonderful to gather everyone and enjoy some cake. I also happened to get some presents, which were not necessary, but greatly appreciated. Thanks to everyone for getting together to help me celebrate.
Some reflecting on this milestone will need to be done, but until then, I will just share some pictures.
It wasn’t until after I finished writing the blog–several hours after–that I realized I had hit a kind of milestone. The last blog was my 900th blog. I know, I know, 1000 is the milestone and 900 is just the speed bump. Whatever. It’s my speed bump.
No, probably not. I don’t think I have a schedule. I try to be a consistent blogger, but life just seems to get in the way. I might be out enjoying one of the Perfect Moments and can’t write. I might be trying to overcome the consequences of one of those Perfect Moments–also called the less than Perfect Hangover) or I might be so tired from work and explaining relative clauses that I am too tired to string words together for the blog.
I didn’t really have a plan. At best, I probably had a hope of where I would be. I probably hoped I would be hip deep in followers, being courted by companies to review their products, and travelling around the world on someone else’s dime.
Absolutely! Despite what I have written above, the whole experience has been excellent. I have written a few good sentences and maybe even a few good pieces. I have laughed, I have smirked, and once or twice I have even snorted. If I have entertained anyone half as well as I have been entertained, I would consider that pretty amazing. In addition to that I have interacted with some great people.
With 900 posts there have got to be a few good ones. Here’s a selection of the ones that still make me smile and still have me dreaming of being a writer. It may be one post, or one paragraph, or one sentence, or even just a word pair, but hopefully you find something to smile about.
Yes. Most likely yes. You’ve got to celebrate any victory or occasion that you can. What if I stopped blogging tomorrow? I would never get to 1000.
The future is the next blog post. I will tell you when I get there.
Yesterday, my blog recorded its ten thousandth view for this year. That is a fantastic number for me. In my first year, I had less than one thousand. I never formally acknowledged that I wanted to reach this number, but in the back of my mind this has been one of my goals since last year Last year I had a little more than five thousand views and I had hoped to double that this year. It looks at though I will. While there are some bloggers who do these kind of numbers in a month, or week, or even just one day, they are new to me, and definitely worth mentioning.
It feels kind of wrong to me to trumpet my success. Maybe that is just how I was brought up. However, there are three things that convinced me to take a moment to write this post.
The first is that if someone asked me if they should do it, regardless of what I would do myself, I would encourage them to revel in their accomplishments. I would tell them to celebrate everything, acknowledge and enjoy everything, and certainly be happy about it. One of the lessons I have learned, rather recently, is that if my advice is good enough for someone else, it should be good enough for me.
The second reason is that I would like to thank everyone who follows the blog, drops by the blog, and comments on the blog. I have met so many interesting people and read so many interesting blogs. I feel like I have made a connection with some people. If I hadn’t, I probably would have given this up long ago.
Thirdly, and lastly, this is the only thing that qualifies as The Perfect Moment for yesterday. Okay, I did have a white grape popsicle, and see some very red leaves (finally), but that’s it. Ten thousand views seems like the thing to celebrate.
Maintaining or achieving happiness sometimes means stretching your definitions. I search for good things or at least things that make me smile everyday. Some days that means being delighted with my fortune cookie, some days that means finding joy in the absurdity of my fellow commuters (which happens a lot) and some days that means revelling in accomplishments that are trivial.
Maybe out of stubbornness, or pride, or unclear logic, I can’t (and won’t) equate passing the next level of Candy Crush or (the far superior) Cookie Jam with achievement. However, I will celebrate things like a cleaned up desktop. I can celebrate getting all my laundry done. I can even celebrate when a blog post gets more than ten views. I will even celebrate a preparing a meal with more than one vegetable in it.
It is in this vein that I celebrate something rather trivial, but which seemed remarkable enough for me to (ahem) remark on it. (Perhaps I should spend a bit of time with my thesaurus).
So, it should be restated that I play darts. That being said, I can’t honestly say I play darts well. I show some brief glimpses of decent play but mostly I am in the lower mediocre ranking. I enjoy the game though. Where I play, it is social as well as slightly competitive. Perhaps the fact that you can drink beer while playing makes it even more fun.
What all dart players aspire to is the magical score of 180. This means getting all three darts in the triple twenty spot. If you watch darts on TV, you have seen professional dart players do that with ease. I have never done it myself, though. Not in a match, not while warming up and not even at home when it didn’t matter. In fact, in a couple of years of playing, I have only seen it twice .
When I first started playing, I never practiced at home. I bought a dartboard, but procrastination didn’t allow me to get it set up. Faithful readers of the blog will remember that I finally got some home organization done and have had the dartboard up for a while.(see here)
I have had more time for practice and I often find myself throwing for a few minutes every day. I usually throw until I have hit the triple twenty at least once. Then maybe I throw triples for another number or the try to hit the bull’s-eye.
The other day, I was feeling pretty consistent and I hit the best score I have every gotten (anywhere). I scored 174. That was two triple 20’s and a triple 18. I was so excited that I had to take a picture.
In terms of bragging rights, it doesn’t amount to much. It wasn’t in a match. There were no witnesses and no one to say “nice darts” except the voice inside my head. The thing is, I don’t care if I was the only one. That was some fantastic darts. I threw them and I am damn proud of myself. I am going to blow my own horn until someone hears me. It may not “count” in the “official” scheme of things, but it counts for me. I feel good and that is all that matters.
Too often people downplay their achievements because they are not achievements in the eyes of others. That stops for me right here and right now.
It’s funny how we attach significance to numbers. Numbers like ten look good. Numbers like 25 and 50 look good. Numbers like 100 seem so large by comparison. This is especially so when we are talking about personal milestones.
Where am I going with this? I am not exactly sure. Indulge me for a moment, won’t you?
On Friday, I finished my 50th book of the year. I admit that I was happy about this, though not ecstatic. I had only really set a vague reading goal for this year. I certainly hadn’t chosen a numerical goal. I knew that I wanted to read more non fiction books but that was about it. So far it has been a good year for reading books written by women, but if you’ve read that post, you’ll know that it was something that just happened as a result of recommendations from my librarian.
There was another reason for my lack of celebration. You see, the fiftieth book was one I didn’t particularly care for. I finished it, but I thought about not finishing it often. It wasn’t badly written, it just didn’t deliver. It was a book about finding what you’re good at and making a career out of it–or so I thought. In actuality, it was a book about how other people found what they were good at and why school wasn’t good at helping you find what you are good at. Instead of advice, I got a bunch of lovely stories of other people’s success.
Fifty is a good number of books to read, and based on a lot of people’s facebook posts, this seems to be some kind of milestone. The thing is, I kind of wish that the 50th book was something better, something worth the label of the fiftieth book. Why couldn’t I have read “The Sun Also Rises” or ” Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” for my fiftieth book. Okay, those are bad examples because I had already read them many years ago. The point is that I feel like I should have picked a better book to hit the 50 mark with.
Think of it in terms of baseball. Wouldn’t you love to see the record breaking hit be a homerun? Wouldn’t you rather have the record breaking RBI be a homerun rather than a walk or being hit by a pitch. If it was football, setting the yardage record in the process of scoring a touchdown would be so much more satisfying. Wouldn’t it? Am I making too much of this? Maybe I should be attacking the number fifty instead. Maybe 47 is the new 50? It’s a prime number, so perhaps I could attach more importance to it. The 48th book I read was stellar (Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller), so maybe I should make 48 the more important number–it works while playing darts.
Perhaps all these things are somewhat random anyway. Context decides everything. Sweet 16 is important. Twenty-one is important. For one of my friends, thirty is her very defining number–but she’s got a whole blog built around that one.
It isn’t even October, so while this number seems important now, I might fade into obscurity by the time the new year rolls around. However, for right now, it feels like I should have done more to commemorate the number.
An Archive of Perfect Moments 