Petit Lapin au Chocolat: Toe in the water

So this is it. This is having a blog. My own blog. I'm always a little late to the party, but here I am, and I'm wearing my party panties.

Today I spent a lot of time hashing through some of my creative ideas. Last night I had a discussion with my partner about a cool little neighborhood business idea I have, and frankly, I'm dismayed at the result - I have to scale back my initial proposal and start smaller than I'd hoped. But you know, this is a good exercise for me, because I am always trying to skip to the finish, too lazy to do everything it takes to get what I want, and damn it, I'm gettin' on up (geriatric James Brown style) toward 40 and it's time to pull up the bootstraps (or more to the point, the party panty straps). What?! I actually have to do something to make this happen?

My amazing baby girl just turned one and she's accomplished more in the last year than I have in the last ten. She's learned to coo, eat, babble, hold up her head, crawl, walk, faire ca-ca in the pot, and now she is communicating in four* languages. FOUR LANGUAGES! It's humbling, really. It makes me proud and it pisses me off. My biggest accomplishment of the year? (Besides having a baby, which is not so much an accomplishment as getting knocked up and waiting for nature to take its course.) I managed to get to the halfway mark of a manuscript that was promised to a publisher two years ago. They've grown so desperate that they offered me a 10 percent COMPLETION BONUS. Just. Please. Finish.

To further behumble myself, here's a quote a friend sent me when I told her about my business idea. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck:

Until one is committed, there is the chance to draw back; always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occured. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. ... "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it."

That bit of inspiration has been chronically misattributed to Goethe, but is actually W.H. Murray from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition. [Psst! Who?]

And this (verbal) quote from the legendary Joseph Campbell:

When you follow your bliss – and by "bliss" I mean the deep sense of being in it and doing what the push is out of your own existence; you follow that and doors will open where you would not have thought there were going to be doors and where there wouldn't be doors for anybody else. There's something about the integrity of a life and the world moves in and helps.

The integrity of a life. That blows me away.

Anyway, welcome to my blog. My blog. Hilarious! This from someone who bought her first computer in 2001 (yeah, a real techie) – the amazing and talented Sugar Baby, who was of course worth the wait, but who is about to become my daughter's computer when mama buys herself a shiny new one. Huh, how many times did I switch person in that sentence?

Mmm... when the grammar talk starts, it's time to close. Night-night.

*French, Mandarin, ASL, and uh... English