trudging through for prizes

I pep talk me here. If you make it all the way through this navel-gazer, you get a couple of unrelated Crackerjack-style prizes:

Hey, there, Tina. You look down. Blog 365 is blowing your mind a little bit, isn't it? A year...it's looking pretty long. Yeah. I get that. Years are big. But hey! Listen, you. Look at you! It's March and you've only missed like two days this whole year. And you made up for it, didn't you, with extra posts. Yes, you did, champ.

It's okay to stick a YouTube video up here sometimes. It's just called Blog 365. It's not called Blog 365: Total Fucking Constant Excellence & Innovation 2008. It's just about making 365 posts. Sometimes it gets towards midnight, and you've either forgotten to post or felt like, "I have nothing to say, so why say it to the world?" Oh, yes. The tragedy of blogdom. Millions of people with nothing to say, saying it to the world. You want to be here for a reason - even if it's a microscopic, dorktastic reason.

Well, listen, lady. You got two areas that this Blog 365 business can help you improve. A, you're a perfectionist. You don't want to do things if you're not going to do them well. B, you're lazy. Lay-Z. L'A-Z. So this way you get to swim against both of those streams and build a couple of little muscles: the it's-okay-to-suck-a-little muscle and the oh-just-do-it-already muscle. Maybe at the end of the year you will have made a little psychological dent in yourself, dug a new brain hole big enough to plant a wee tree in.

See?

There you go. Attagirl.

Okay. Here are your prizes!

Here's this thing I found courtesy of the excellent Lee Stranahan. If you're an artist of any kind, you should read it: 1000 True Fans. It's a great framework for thinking about making a living through your art, if your form applies.

And this kind of thing is exactly why I love YouTube:

Sheila E. singing "The Belle of St. Mark"! I loved this song long ago. It completely drifted out of my consciousness, and now I get to pluck it out of obscurity. It feels like finding a sweet old note someone passed me in Algebra class with bubble letters and code names for crushes.