#reverb10: Ordinary Joy

Ordinary joy. Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year? (Author: Brené Brown)

When I saw this prompt last night in my email inbox, I scoffed. “How many more ‘moments’ could these reverb people possibly want me to remember?” I thought, “don’t they know I have the memory of a drunk flea? Anyway, I have ANSWERED this one already. Day 2: Moment. Day 14: Appreciate. Day 15: List everything you want to remember in 5 minutes. It’s all moments. The world is made UP of moments. And it’s not like I don’t appreciate them. This whole damn blog is about moments. Joy and otherwise.”

After sleeping on it, and being woken at 4 am by one of the children, and then unable to get back to sleep for what seemed like two hours but was really more like one hour, I still don’t feel like answering the prompt. And, because it is this sort of exercise where you can take what you like and leave the rest, I do not at all feel like a failure. Hooray!

However. I did receive a (number of) wonderful Christmas gift(s) this year (including THE ROOM, which is the worst movie ever made, truly, worse than Battlefield Earth, even. Worse than Italian Stallion, Sylvester Stallone’s soft-core porn film) and among them, a 2011 calendar book. My in-laws, who know me well and also read this here blog, sent it to me.

“…its design is based on the original WWII poster commissioned by the British Government’s Ministry of Information.”

I love it. I feel it. I feel it so deeply in my soul it is like soul food.

However, I have a daytimer calendar book; I’ve had it for years and I just bought a new year’s worth of pages for it, at great personal emotional expense, as I took the children with me to Staples (the office supply superstore) stupidly thinking they would be fascinated by helping me choose the correct size pages for my daytimer calendar book. Need I say it, they were not. They went directly to the SAFE (holy misnomer, Batman!) display at the back of the store and attempted to pull hundreds of pounds of – what are safes made of? – heavy metal on top of themselves while the teenage staff glowered impotently at me.

All that BEFORE they discovered the pretzel M&M display.

So. I am invested in my old daytimer. But I love the new calendar book, so I must use it. I MUST USE IT. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

I am thinking what I will do is this: I will use the new calendar book as a writing prompt book. I have enjoyed writing every day for #reverb10. It is good exercise. Having read the amazing posts of Amanda Practical Magic for Beginners who has written every day for a year a year A YEAR!1! I know it is possible to write every day on a blog and have it not totally suck. That is an understatement. Practical Magic for Beginners is fantastic. Also, she is writing five other books (might be an over or understatement) concurrently. I am such a slacker!

So, for the next week (and on) I will think up a bunch of prompts and write them in my new calendar book, one a day for the year, and then every day I will write something. Here.

Two questions:

1. Does that sound incredibly annoying to you? Because I have heard that some people who have The RSS feeds and whatnot get annoyed if their feeds get clogged up with daily posts from people they subscribe to. I, m’self, browse the WWW in a very old-fashioned, haphazard sort of way, where I use twitter and my bookmarked sites to read around, so I might get caught up on someone’s 18 most recent posts over a few days but the knowledge that they are posting every day is lost on me because I forget to check for days at a time.

2. Do you have any prompt suggestions? Please, no moments. Thanks.