Gift cards are a wonderful thing and when a gift card comes from one of my favorite places, my initial reaction is one of delight.  Having someone who cares about me and knows me well enough to pick my favorite store is the best. And so I go with great excitement to my favorite store and this is where the anxiety begins.  Should I settle for buying something I need or get something less practical that I want?  Buy things on sale so I can get more items or splurge on the one expensive item?  It’s like I need to make the most of the experience because I don’t get it very often and I’m afraid of making the wrong choices.  Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard of?  Yes, I’m sure it is, but it’s a great analogy as to how I feel about writing my blog some days.

You see, I tend to be both a geek and slightly competitive.  I love keeping track of the numbers of views I get for my blogs and try to write things that bring in the higher numbers of readers.  Then I start trying to figure out trends in terms of what people are reading and what they aren’t.  After all, if I want to one day be a serious writer, I want my writing to mean something to my readers and, well, honestly, it might be nice to make a little money on the side.  And since I’ve decided to try to write every day, sometimes the well is a bit dry in terms of what I might consider good ideas and then the anxiety sets in.  What if people get tired of what I write about?  Should I write about something funny or something serious?  Do I direct my writing towards my audience or write about what I feel strongly about at the moment?  Everybody says you should write what you know, but what if nobody finds what I know interesting?  So many doubts.  So much anxiety.

It’s not like I’ve gotten negative responses on the blogs.  All of my friends reading these have been very kind and supportive.  So it’s really just me, I suppose.  But this is one of those nights when I’ve struggled with what to write.  There is just so much negativity going on in the world right now that I’m feeling emotionally overwhelmed and I just couldn’t put feelings into words tonight.  Nothing much is happening at school, unless I talk about how I’m trying to be cool and do my best moves to Cray Cray Christmas in my classroom.  Thank goodness there are no cameras in there!  Like all of my fellow music colleagues, we’re in the midst of concerts and sing-a-longs and looking forward perhaps to not hearing any more holiday music already.  But that’s pretty humbug of me.

I could write about my ride to school this morning, where I noticed that the clouds looked like individual feathers fanned out across the sky and that the ripples in the lake from the movement of the ducks formed a beautiful “V” shape.  I could write about how I’ve been having multiple anxiety attacks per day for about a week now and can’t figure out why.  I could write about how thankful I am to be married to a wonderful man who is the complete opposite of all the slimeballs I’m seeing on the news lately.  I could write about how discouraged I am that our state department of education decided to take out all language involving music and a well rounded education in their state ESSA report.  After attending meetings, learning about ESSA, giving face to face feedback, filling out surveys, nothing was included.

I had a colleague tell me the other day that I tended to have really random thoughts.  You think? This is both a blessing and a curse.  I have a never-ending stream of thoughts and ideas but struggle to decide which of these to write about.  And just like using the gift card, what are the important things I “need” to write about and what are those crazy things that I “want” to write about.  I do know one thing.  Writing is the thing I look forward to most in my day now.  I look for things happening during the day to have things to write about and I can’t wait to put my own spin on them. That’s why I think days like today are so frustrating because I don’t have that one fabulous idea or story line.

So maybe if I’m not finding things to write about, I’m not looking hard enough?  Like spending the gift card on just the right thing, it takes some searching to find just the right thing to write about.  But in the meantime, unfortunately, this is what you get today.  Just another day wandering around my random thoughts.