A tapir is an absolutely ridiculous animal. It’s like a platypus in that it’s an absolute animal medley. It looks like a pig with thin hair, but is actually related to the horse and rhinoceros. Its front feet have four toes, and the hind feet have three toes and it has a skinny short tail, but its nose is its most prominent feature – it’s drawn out to form a movable, short trunk. American tapirs are born with brown coats marked with yellowish streaks that disappear as they grow into adulthood. And if all that weren’t strange enough, tapirs tweet and sound like birds.
In other words, it’s a hodgepodge of an animal. So what in the heck does a tapir have to do with this blog? I have a new focus on my hobbies, all of which recently fell to the wayside. Rather than start out small, I thought I’d challenge myself and go big to make up for it and commit to a big project – one that lasts an entire year. So beginning tomorrow, every day for the next 365 days, I’m going to post something on this blog. Rather than writing about one topic every day or just about my life in general in the (smaller) big city similar to what I did on small-town girl In The BIG CITY, each day will have its own unique theme to keep it exciting and different, which will make up a blog like seemingly random animal parts make up a tapir. Here are the themes: Sunday: Shakespeare’s High School Poetry. All writers and poets have jotted down something they find many years later and think, “I can’t believe I actually wrote this crap” as they’re locked inside the bathroom burning the inferior work in the bathtub. Shakespeare probably was the exception to this phenomenon, as he’s unbelievably brilliant, but maybe he began with mediocre work when he was younger. It makes me think there just might be hope for some greatness in my future writing career. So every week I’ll be exploring a different type of poetry by writing a poem in a different style to enrich my own work, which I can only hope somewhat resembles the kind of stuff Shakespeare would have written in high school.
Monday: Never Have I Ever. I'll have seven days every week to try something new, whether it be for the entire week, for a day, or just for the moment, and every Monday I'll have an opportunity to write about my findings.
Tuesday: What did Batman say to Robin? The title of this week coincides with a ridiculous joke a friend told me once. For this day each week, I'll either pose and then refute a random question from a friend, or answer and get a response from a random question. The more out of the box the topic, the better to take a break from all the monotony of being an adult on a Tuesday. Even if only for a short time.
Wednesday: If I Ruled Lichtenstein. I have my ideas of the way the world should work, and it's about dang time I shared them in the hope that it might inspire some change. So on Wednesdays, I'll be sharing my ideas for my utopian society.
Thursday: Remember The Time? This is one of my favorite phrases. I generally use it, however, in a negative context, as in, “Remember the time I was running late, charged through the door at work, and smashed right into the head of my group?” Or I’ll use it with mock sarcasm to colleagues I supervise by saying something like, “Remember the time I asked you to do your job?” So while all that is fair game, essentially this is a day for storytelling. It’s a day where I have free reign to write about anything in my past, which is, after all, how I became the person I am today.
Friday: Stop. Focus. Click. All too often, events in my life resemble the color wheel in Adobe Photoshop. Each color blends into another seamlessly until it becomes a completely different color. My life changes in big ways all too fast, and while the major adjustments are always easy to recall, it’s those little moments that mean so much at the time that become harder to remember as time goes on. This blog post at the end of every workweek will remind me how important it is to slow down and capture these precious small experiences.
Saturday: A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words. If a picture truly is worth 1,000 words, then it shouldn't be too hard to guess which popular overused phrase - otherwise known as a... grr... cliche - I'll be depicting every Saturday with just one photo. Take a guess each week at what phrase I'm referring to, and you'll find out whether you're right the following Saturday.
This is me jumping into the pool. The water’s nice. Why don’t you join me?
