Every year around the start of the fall semester I get a wild hair and decide to start journaling. It never works out. I run across articles on the web exclaiming the myriad benefits of keeping a daily log, and I get all excited and stoked to start my new organized life. It isn't like I don't have enough to do already; I've been in college since 2010 (second victory lap, for the win!), work as an equine and canine massage therapist (yes, that is actually a thing), gig and session musician, organic farm lackey, and mom/home-school teacher/slave of a tyrannical, brilliant and evil mastermind who just happens to be an eight year old girl in her most current physical manifestation.

Today is October what, the 20th, I think? I got my annual journal-desire-surge sometime in late August, flew to Staples and wandered the aisle with all the pretty horses---JOURNALS, oops---and plopped down on that ubiquitous dingy gray carpet that every carbon-copy-madhouse-clone-store has, pulled several promising candidates off the shelves (to the severe chagrin of one tiny mouse woman wearing the corporate emblem, and whose chin could have sliced my nose off with Gintu-level sharpness), and set about finding the perfect companion to my sudden-onset diary disorder. I savagely narrowed it down to a faux-leather so-soft-I-started-crying-in-the-middle-of-the-store-unironically (ok who am I kidding, it was definitely cliche) in black or electric pink. I chose the safe route, only because it would be harder to explain to The Tyrant why she couldn't have the pretty pink book to write her theories on reincarnation and a reordering of the Linnaeus classification system.

So new little black book in hand, and later that evening after an exhausting, bloody pit fight with the reincarnation of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra over what time bedtime actually is, I wrote something, just a little "100 thoughts" list, but it was something! I even did it again the next night. And then again two nights later. And then I got distracted with my loop pedal and creating a cover mash-up of Make Me by Britney Spears and The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service, so that was the end of this year's journaling infection.

I'm not even sure I would want an inoculation against journal flu if it existed, it's kind of nice having that little seasonal change marker to remind me we are all going to die. Whoa, that took a turn all dark and twisty, yikes. If you are interested in picking up the habit of journaling, I found a cool article with ideas on how to get into the habit:

http://journaltherapy.com/journal-cafe-3/journal-c...

Although, if you would like to hear the mashup:

https://soundcloud.com/carmen-allen-henke/make-me-...