I was on my way here to write a post, thought I’d read a few first, got sidetracked to a site called WordCountJournal, and signed up—as if I need another thing to keep up with when my desk is all akimbo with magazines and newsletters, crumpled receipts, spare change, piles of books, half-read mail, paper clips, journals in various stages of completion, CDs (mostly relaxation/self-healing stuff that really helps calm me when I remember to listen, which is, like, never), pens, highlighters, iBook (when it’s not on my lap), printer/fax/copier, wicker basket with god know what’s stacked there, to-do lists scribbled on post-it notes (I actually call them stickies, but I used to have a co-worker who said with utmost condescension, “Stickies???? Don’t you mean post-it notes, dear????, whenever I used the term, so my first impulse here was to avoid my term of choice. Ah, self-censorship is never ending.) Anyway, at WordCountJournal you sign up for a journal in which you write using a rigid structure: one word the first day, two the second, three the third and so on. At the end of a year, you have a book-length journal. I had to give my journal a name, and what came to mind was, Why bother? So, that’s what I used. It aptly expresses my state of mind today and, perhaps, it captures a less than stellar aspect of my personality that is always pulling me down to some degree, some days more than others. Ah life, we all have our challenges; some of them seem insurmountable. Life wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting if we didn’t have them though. Speaking of challenges, torture just came to mind, I think, because yesterday I read part of an article in Vanity Fair about how the Bush Administration got torture going in Guantanamo and other places, insisting the types of extreme and abusive interrogation methods it put in place aren’t really torture, of course. But imagining the horror of it all makes me think how lucky I am to never have been tortured or been forced into torturing another person. (I figure most people who get stuck doing something like that didn’t really strive to be in that position but were most likely ordered to do it by a commanding officer in the military or a branch of the intelligence community, but how would I know really, never having met a torturer—to my knowledge.) Gotta stop now, didn’t sleep last night (got a lot of work done though) but I’m about to crash.

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