Introducing National Closure Day

our assignment is to publish a post in one hour. Here is tonight’s challenge:

“Create a new holiday, or holidays, that you believe should exist.” This can be about anything and take place anywhere, it can be another traditional holiday, a food holiday, Congressional gridlock holiday, metaphysical holiday, Bieber holiday, world holiday, whatever you can conceive. It can be one holiday that you go into a great amount of detail about, or a list of five to 10 holidays with briefer descriptions.

My idea:  National Closure Day aka Ease Your Pain Day.  This would be a day where anyone could ask anyone else for whatever they need to bring about closure for a past trespass, pain or wrong doing.

There would have to be rules of course. First, Do No Harm.  You couldn’t claim that sleeping with some unrequited love or beating up some assclown will suddenly make your life complete.  However, you would be allowed to request that someone who turned you down or broke up with you provide you an explanation.

• You’d be able to ask that company why they made you go through 6 interviews, but then didn’t even bother sending you a rejection letter;
• You’d be able to ask that liberal arts college why the didn’t accept your application;
• You’d be able to ask that boss why you were really passed up for that promotion;
• you’d be able to ask that bully why he choose you to pick on;You’d be able to ask friend why they suddenly stop keeping in touch;
• You’d be able to ask that girl/boy why they chose so-and-so instead of you.

And in the future, if the technology allowed, you’d be able to see what would have happened IF…

• you had chosen Computer Science instead of Psychology;
• you had gone to UCLA instead of Purdue;
• you went to the army instead of the navy.

There would be the potential for everyone to find closure and healing in whatever Mystery of Life troubles them.

 

Thank you for reading and I hope you will comment below. Please also do any and all of the following — I know pushy right!

• “Like” and “Share” this post using those buttons under the headline.
• follow me on Twitter
• see some mildly amusing photos and posts on my Facebook Fan Page.
• Subscribe by email below.

Type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.

Deleting everything in my Inbox and Not Feeling Guilty about it

So I use the email account associated with this blog (therunninggod@gmail.com) to subscribe to other blogs I like as well a few random newsletters like Tomshardware and How-To-Geek, along with my fair share of Nigerian Bank Scams and Hot Local Women who want to meet me. I generally do a good job of keeping up with my reading, especially when I have bouts of insomnia. This is what I call research and homework for coming up with topics for this blog.

However, now that the twins have arrived I don’t have time to keep up with it all. My inbox grew from 10 to 100 very quickly. When that happens the “Mailbox” app I use flashes “help me get to zero” which will archive everything based on some criteria, the default being Archive everything marked unread.

Here at ChicagoNow we preach the Generosity Trinity:

• Please like my FB Fan Page will do as soon as you like mine)
• Please follow me on twitter and subscribe (you betcha)
• Please like, share and comment on my posts (did I say please enough?)

Being catholic, even lapsed as I am, I’m programmed to feel guilty. I feel guilty that I don’t always take the time to simply click on the post so it gets my magical Pageview that will naturally propel it to the top 20 read blogs that week/day/month. Guilty that I don’t have time to read or comment.  Guilty that when I do read the post, I don’t delete it from my inbox because I want to comment but I need to do it as Mysteries of Life and can only do that from an ordinary PC browser, not the iPad Safari browser.  Guilty that I don’t have time to share. In fact, I only share a post when I really really like it or when I have nothing to share on my own FB Fan Page.

Of course after guilty comes denial, rationalization and a long nap. I was feeling bad about not keeping up with my subscriptions but then I told myself, hey half of these people don’t’ subscribe to your blog. In fact I was starting to have a little pity party because I see some bloggers commenting way more on other posts than on mine.

But then the words of our fearless and bearded leader Jimmy:

“Somebody will always have more page views than you, more followers and write a better post. Accept that. And then stop caring, because it won’t do anything but make you feel envious, which takes you down an unhealthy path.”

Jimmy is kinda ChicagoNow’s Yoda, though not as tall, and  to paraphrase Yoda: “unhealthy path leads to to the dark side. Dark Side means you fall down and hurt yourself.”

So this is where I would try to wrap this all up in a great after school special lesson learned thing.  Okay then.  The reason the other bloggers aren’t commenting and sharing my post is because they are not noticing them.  And they are not noticing them because I’m not writing interesting enough stuff to get their attention and promoting the fuck out of it.  So I’m just gonna have to get better.  So better that I’m in the top 10 every week.

Or I could just take that nap.

Thank you for reading and I hope you will comment below. Please also do any and all of the following — I know pushy right!

• “Like” and “Share” this post using those buttons under the headline.
• follow me on Twitter
• see some mildly amusing photos and posts on my Facebook Fan Page.
• Subscribe by email below.

Type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.