Sometime back in the early 80’s, a smiling, young and foolish version of myself would gather with his friends on New Year’s Day, where we would proceed to all make smiling, young and foolish New Year’s resolutions.  Whether or not anyone kept any of them, I don’t know.  It’s doubtful.  I don’t even remember any of them - with the exception of one.

Each year I would make the same bold statement that 19** (whatever the year) would be my year of Economic Recovery.  It seemed like such a hopeful resolution.  I could imagine the feeling of no longer chasing after the money, working two, sometimes three part-time jobs, going to school, and attempting to manage love.  Economic Recovery, it seemed to me back then, was the one key that would unlock any door.

The resolution was always made in jest.  Better to laugh and lose then grow serious and fail, I thought to myself.  But behind the years of stating that each and every year would be my year of Economic Recovery lived the tiny hope that the jest would become real.  Imagine what life would be like if resolutions came true.  Imagine how happy things could be.

I have always found ways to keep hope alive in my mind, and Economic Recovery was no exception.  The jestful resolution and multiple jobs were one way back then.  I wrote stories, where Economic Recovery personified into some mystical person, who somehow avoided all my searches.  I think I even imagined that time and age alone would take care of things.  Economic Recovery would ride into my life on the most mythical beasts of all - the American Dream, which I naturally assumed back in those smiling, young and foolish days was the logical end result of time and age. 

Of course, time and age, I have come to realize, have nothing to do with Economic Recovery.  Life is more like a storm then a straight line, with us in the center and life spinning all around us.  For me, the idea of Economic Recovery is just one of those things, twirling around, just out of reach.  I still keep an eye out from time to time, but I don’t think much about chasing after him.

Besides, only the fool dreams of writing and economics at the same time.  The writer, however much they deny it, likes to imagine their head as the center of the universe.  I have come to view my debt as just one of my many galaxies.

In the particular valley I live in, snow is a rarity.  Once, maybe twice every few years it’ll come down, bringing life to a halt.  No one is prepared for snow here.  It’s like the end of the world when it happens, but in a nice way.

Born and raised in the midwest, this is of course, funny to me.  Let’s say someone from Florida moved somewhere far, far north, and one day the temperature soared to a record high 80 degrees.  Everyone would step outside their doors, jaws slack in wonder, as they sweated and watched the historic event.  Everyone, I guess, except our imagined Florida transplant, who might step outside and think . . . finally.

Oregonians are sometimes like that.  They get all funny when it snows too much or even, get this, it rains too much.  The news stations will even name the storms sometimes, giving a whopping 5 or 6 inches of snow the prestige of a hurricane.

Me, I stepped outside and shoveled the walk, remembering the time my 78 year old grandpa made me join him in shoveling a foot of snow off of our one mile long driveway.  I kid you not.

If I’d stuck with the original plan, this blog would have been born back around February or March of 2002.  That was just about the time I was being introduced to my wife’s new boyfriend and life was beginning to feel a little too tight.  But then, for me the words wife’s new boyfriend seem proof enough that original plans don’t always work out.

In hindsight, the original plan had its flaws.  For one, I would have had to actually do some thinking during a time that I seemed capable of only one thought.  Writing, at least good writing, usually requires the mind to breathe, and I don’t think my brain took a good deep breath of air until just a couple of months ago.  The only thing I can think of, is that my lungs must have taken pity on the poor, beaten up brain, slipping it a drop or two of oxygen when it wasn’t looking. 

Someone asked me once why I didn’t write it all down, all of that original plan gone awry stuff.  It was jodi I think, who seems to have that incredible talent of writing everything down.  I don’t know.  It just seemed too hard.  Or maybe I thought if I didn’t write it down I would be able to someday forget everything that happened.

But some of it made it down.  A tiny taste of that suffocating emotion and pain, and even some funny stuff, like the time I discovered I made a lousy detective.  For everyone’s information, in matters very little how many millions of minivans are on the roads, they’re just no good for sneaking around in.

I can see already that things just aren’t right.  “Come on, do it! do it!”  I can still hear your words in my head.  “Just do it,” everyone said, “You’re a born blogger.”  Well where are you now, my friends.  Years ago it was your foolish crowd mentality, chanting “chug, chug, chug,” which slowly mellowed into a softer, friendlier sounding, “blog, blog, blog.”  So, like then, I have given in.  Heeded the call.  I did it.

Yes, I did it, a couple of years later, in my procrastinating full speed ahead kind of way.  But even waiting that long suddenly doesn’t seem quite long enough, as I’m thinking now that Word Shadows shouldn’t have been the name at all, but maybe Procrastination’s Shadow.  I would like to imagine, at least, that it’s procrastination that follows me, and not the other way around.  But we all know that’s wishful thinking.  I am procrastination’s slave.  Which isn’t always such a bad thing, being the lazy taskmaster that he is. 

But this is no time for procrastination!  The beginning of a new year is no time for that!  We must be bold and resolute and proclaim unreachable goals.  Which, of course, I am getting to.

But my point (I think) was supposed to be that nobody told me to do any planning before I started this thing.  I wrestled around with that damn mysterious html code until I ran out of energy, and now I see that I should have put in some categories and maybe multiple favorite blog lists, because while I like a lot of blogs, I certainly don’t read every single one of them every single day.  So what do I do, make a favorites list and an almost favorites list?  Almost reminds me of the time some girl called up my little brother when he was in about the fourth grade and asked him if he liked her. 

“Just a minute,” he said, put down the phone, walked off, but returned a few seconds later with a scrap of paper, which I later found out was a list.  “Yes,” he told the little girl.  “You’re number 6 on the list.  Okay.  Goodbye.”

I guess I just need to get busy with a little more creating.  I need to be as straight forward and blunt as a nine year old boy.

You know, if the world was in fact created by God, then we’re all lucky it was done in miracles and not html, or we’d all still be sitting here, waiting to get tweaked.  On the other hand, that would explain . . . .

I have obviously been reincarnated as the super domestic, early 20th century housewife.  You never hear about that possibility when you come across reincarnation.  It must be the hidden secret.  I need some help!  My son must be some sort of mitosis king, dividing and growing, redividing and growing all over again at an unprecedented rate.  He’s on a feeding frenzy.  How many meals am I supposed to prepare in one day?

I’ve sought a little help from the Be June Cleaver website.  I don’t have a husband, a pretty dress, or a string of pearls.  But coffee I can do, and a hearty breakfast (WHAT?!  ANOTHER MEAL?!), and if forced, I’ll drag the vacuum around.

I’ll let you know if any of it works.

My son turns the television on, and what should pop up on the screen, but the remake movie of Leave It To Beaver.  Who needs the internet for advice, when they can learn everything they ever needed to know the old-fashioned way, from tv.

I am considering the recommendation to hang feeders all around the house.  It’s one of those suggestions that sounds so promising - a real time saver.

But in the growing boy’s defense, I don’t have to poke pasta down his gaping mouth every time it opens.  Like just now.

“Dad, do we have outlines?”
“Outlines?  What do you mean, outlines?”
“You know - outlines.  Black outlines, like they have on Rugrats or Chalk Zone or The Wild Thornberrys.”
“What do you think we are?  Cartoons?”

Actually, I think he might have been trying to distract me.  For someone who didn’t own many of the properties on the Junior Monopoly board, he sure seemed to be accumulating huge sums of money.

I’ve crammed as much computer knowledge into my head as I can for one night.  I’m reminded of the torturous French class I was coerced into taking one summer, as my deceptively cruel alma mater dangled a degree just beyond my greedy little hands.  It’s only three semesters of French crammed into four-hour classes, five days a week, for six short weeks, they said.  You can do it.  My advisor, bless his now dead heart, only smiled when I told him the plan.  His gray, bushy eyebrows lifted in obvious lack of faith.  The man had no time for foolish students who insisted on walking straight into the mouth of disaster.  He said nothing, but his eyebrows kept on climbing right up his forehead, distancing themselves from me and my impending doom.

The difference between computer code and French is that there is no logical way to attack French.  So I would just fill my head up with as much as I possibly could, then hurry to class and hope that a respectable amount of it would come pouring back out.  I felt like I was literally trying to regurgitate my way into a degree.  I’d stumble out of the room after the four hours, holding my throbbing head, vowing that I when I’d clumsily muttered “répété, s’il vous plaît for the one millionth last time, I would go cold turkey.  No more French.  Abstinence.  Not one more syllable.  I was the original anti-French patriot, and I didn’t even know it.

My vow was easy to keep.  As a matter of fact, I am French-free ever since.  The language poured in so fast, that I’m afraid not a bit of it stuck.  If it did, it’s lost in there, and I’m not about to go looking.

Well, just like my French class, I sucked up everything I could tonight about rearranging blogs, figuring it would come spewing back onto the page with just enough orner et la beauté to earn me a passing grade.  And now that my night is winding to a close, I can see that arranging nearly incomprehensible code is not a whole lot different then learning French.  You breathe it it.  You breathe it out.  And then you push the “Publish” button and hopefully forget everything, because if you fall asleep and start dreaming the stuff, that’s when you start to get a little cranky.

So if anyone would like to put in their two cents worth regarding the design - feel free.  But don’t do it in French.  Just because I wrote a couple of phrases only means that I know my way over to Babblefish.

It’s freezing in here!  I swear the only heat in the place is from the friction between my fingertips and keyboard.  I’ve typed furiously all day, but it’s a big place.  No one can type that fast.  I’ve decided that my only refuge is the comfortable chair, wrapped in a blanket, watching a movie.

I’ve rented just about every movie the local shops have to offer, so the pickings seem to be getting thinner and thinner.  Last year, at the height of my low time (that’s a good one), I would sometimes watch three or four movies a day.  It seems impossible, but I assure you, it can be done.  I became a movieaholic, pouring them into my brain as fast as my eyes could watch them.  A chain watcher - I’d pop open the next case before the movie I was watching even had a chance to finish.  DVD’s are great - no rewinding.  It speeds up the whole process and makes the movieaholic’s life so much easier.

I had a good reason for becoming a movieaholic, but I won’t get into that right now.  Let’s just say that tonight’s pick, Down With Love, couldn’t be a more excellent clue.  What an evening.  Wrapped in a blanket freezing to death while watching that squinched-faced Renee Zellweger fall in love with the dashing Ewan McGregor.  The box promises that the sparks will fly me to the moon and back.  Great.  Just what I need.  The even more intense cold of outer space.  I better get two blankets.

I’m not sure whether to be thankful for the ease of iTunes or not.  When I first got home with my new PowerBook and oohed and aahed and loaded all my music and realized how simple and reliable it was going to be, I never counted on my eight year old son discovering the huge stash of Beatles songs and deciding to burn one CD after another.

Yes, thanks to iTunes ease, I now have the words I am the egg man . . . I am the egg man . . . I am the walrus . . . kook kook a choo stuck in my head.  Two straight days of I am the egg man . . . is more then enough, I think.  So I’ve decided that the only way to purge this thing is to bundle up, brave the freezing rain, and walk the few steps it takes to get to the nearest diner and have them whip me up one of their delicious omelettes.  I give up.  I will be the egg man, hoping that it stops there.  I have desire whatsoever to be a walrus.

Curiously, in the fresh little blog Lines (which I’m hoping will blossom into the nice little writing & art combo blog the owner is also hoping for), I found a reference for what’s ailing me.  It seems I have a case of ear worms.

Full of omelette, I am now prepared for battle.  For not ordering coffee, the waitress punished me by not bringing me my glass of milk, leaving me with only a tiny plastic cup of water to wash the whole thing down with.  Oblivious of my milk, oblivious of whether or not everything was okay with my meal, oblivious of my dissatifaction, and finally, oblivious of her own redemption when she turned the radio up just a bit and the ear worms that have haunted me for two days were finally refreshed.

I am the egg man slipped into someone else’s head (maybe yours - sorry) and was replaced by Willie Nelson’s two best song lines ever:

Love is like a dying ember
And only memories remain

I’m not partial to country music, but it’s hard to not like something that conjures up such visual imagery.

So it is with fresh ears that I turn towards the “work” desk and prepare for battle.  The pile of mail in the inbox finally reached maximum stack height last night and toppled over.  Toppling forward, unfortunately, and not backward.  A forward spill only brought it more into my life, while a backward spill would have conveniently dumped the entire pile into the To Be Shredded trashcan, which would have freed up my whole afternoon.  Rotten luck.