It’s the tenth month of 2018 and I need to check in about blogging daily. I skipped writing 12 times this year and since we’re in the last quarter of the year, I need to start making those up before I end up having to scramble on New Years Eve. This is one such entry. It’s a bit of a throw away, I suppose. It’s writing about writing, which I hate, but I did warn at the outset that some posts would be bad.

I wrote the above paragraph and then happened upon this article in the New York Times: In Praise of Mediocrity. It talks about how no one really has hobbies anymore. Once you start doing something, you have to do your best. Author Tim Wu calls it, “a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time.”

I wish that weren’t true but it is. It’s not enough for me to have a blog. I have to do it every day and I have to get a lot of people to read it. If my views are low, something must be wrong and I have to fix it.

I can’t just enjoy running, I have to run races and I have to increase my pace and run more races to qualify for a marathon.

It’s a constant goal of the improvisers I know: get better. Improve. Challenge yourself.

I can’t think of anything that I do purely for fun with no thought to the result. I baked chocolate chip cookies for the office the other day. I like cookies and I like baking. People in the office ate them and said thank you. How pleasant. What a nice, simple thing.

But they weren’t all uniform. I didn’t chill the dough. I should have chilled the dough. I’m not yet accustomed to the new cookie scoop that I got from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Maybe I should have coated it in flour first to prevent sticking. Watching The Great British Baking Show causes me anxiety because I feel for the people who screw up their creations.

So, like I said, I have some posts to make up. I need to finish this year with all 365 posts. I undertook this challenge because I love writing and I’ll see it to completion even if it kills me.