Last night, I spend an hour and a half playing a game called Jelly Splash on my cell phone. I played from when the kids went to bed until my phone battery died.

And, for an hour and a half, I cursed that game for clearly cheating me by not acting in the ways I wanted to act. I wanted to win. And, like a gambling addict tapping the “ROLL!” button at a casino slot machine, I kept hitting “Play Again!”

So, this morning, when I faced the first day of classes with coffee-fueled energy, I considered blogging.

“You probably don’t have time,” my Self said, cradling the cell phone where Jelly Splash rested behind the sleepy screen.

But the truth is, I have as much time as I make. Like Rumplestiltskin’s gold-spinning trickster, my Self spins all the time it needs for shiny things (JELLY SPLASH) while talking me out of blogging or exercising or eating a salad.

No more lack of time! So far, this post has taken five minutes to write, and while it isn’t the most shining example of professional prose I have ever developed, it’s writing. It’s five more minutes of writing than I had completed five minutes ago.

Last year, I decided to write for just five minutes a day and downloaded vJournal (which works with Evernote) to capture my five minutes of golden straw. I journaled for five days.

This year, I am asking my students to keep a blog, and as I am a masochist, I need to make myself suffer through what they are suffering through so that I can understand their plight. Which means…blogging. And preparing for blogging. Modeling good blogging practice. Talking about and researching blogging.

To be honest, the thought that I will write out words that have an instant (potential but not likely) audience makes me a little woozy. Sure, I can toss out something quick and easy on Facebook, the chocolate protein bar in the online publishing buffet. But to actually put thought into something that I push out nearly instantly into the netherworld of the interwebs?? Ack. I don’t want you to read this. Stop reading. I insist.

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So, here’s my goal. I will blog at least 500 words. I won’t blog every day. On good weeks, I want to blog Monday morning and Friday morning. On bad weeks, I want to blog Monday mornings only.

After all, young Doogie Howser, M.D. wrote after every episode, and he wasn’t even a REAL doctor. And there was no such thing as the internet! He just wrote for a journal that no one would read (except all the show’s viewers, but still).

See? I’ve already written 450 words!

Not only will I write 500 words weekly (apparently, numbers don’t count as words…), I will announce at the end of each blog what the next blog is about so I will be motivated to think about that next blog when I am oh, say, working on trying to possibly…

Time’s up! 🙂

(p.s. The next blog will be about my theme for the year: Simplify! And a bit about why I tossed out the previous theme: Forgiveness.)