"Smile Again"
advantage Lucy
from Fanfare
1999
Alright, that's enough of that for now. We've had a Song of the Day every day for the month of August. That's not sustainable, and I feel comfortable ending the experiment here.
I will call it a success, though. Honestly, it felt really good to blog about random bullshit again. I feel like Puke on Your Birthday gets too wrapped up in the weekly cycles sometimes—album review is due, ah shit now movie write-up is due, whoops I forgot about the mixtape—and maybe that becomes routine. I feel refreshed, having somewhere to write about whatever fucking nonsense popped into my head throughout the month. It felt cool to be like "oh damn, I should write about that" instead of "I wish I had time to write about that but instead I have like seven blog obligations in the queue."
I know that that option is always available to me, like no one is forcing me to write or not write anything besides myself, but it's tough to get momentum sometimes. The "Song of the Day every day" thing was easy because it was a habit. Write about anything, but just do it every day. It worked.
So of course, now that it's worked out for me, my mind starts churning in the way that you can probably already guess it does, based on past behavior on this blog. How can I take this feeling that I have now, and expand it, both upward (do it more often) and outward (involve more people than just me)? A few ideas, not for the immediate future, but for some point down the line.
I mean, this could really just look the same as it did in August, but just do it for an entire year, right? 365 Songs of the Day in the year 2026. Or I guess multiple songs per day, if other people are interested in this. Maybe call it "Daily Song Challenge" and rope it in with the rest of the Song Challenges from our past.
If that's the direction we're moving, then I'd wonder if we needed prompts this time around. I could probably come up with 365 different prompts if pressed. 180 seemed like it was a lot for people during YSC, though, so I don't think doubling that number is going to move the needle of interest at all. I could say something like "you wouldn't have to do it every day!" but that would be the opposite of what made August 2025's Song of the Day project successful. It's tough to do something regularly without momentum, without that habit. You'll notice that whenever someone said "I can't do YSC every day anymore, I'll just do it sometimes," they never ended up doing it again.
Of course, I could always just keep it open-invite on a daily basis and just accept the fact that on the vast majority of days, it's gonna be just me. But I don't know, that seems less fun. Maybe I just miss Yearlong Song Challenge still.
Another variation I was mulling over was something like, I dunno what to call it, maybe "PoYB Scavenger Hunt." Instead of a prompt for certain days on the calendar, I could instead come up with 100-200 loose writing prompts, and say that any of them can be completed at any time, in any order, but you gotta write all of them by the end of the year.
That betrays the real goal I'm shooting for here: I want to come up with a good writing challenge. Writing specifically, like geared toward writing and not music. That's really what these Songs of the Day have been about. Yeah, sure, I attached a song to each one, but those were loosely related at best, and mostly then just through the coincidence of their title. I was writing whatever I wanted, and I was forcing myself to write. I wanted so badly for the Song Challenges to be viewed in this way, for it to be a writing exercise disguised under the veil of a music activity. We got there enough that I was satisfied, but there was still so much "I chose this song because" even at the end that I know the writing was mostly an obligation instead of a joy. What can I do to get people to write more?
When I reach this point in my wild idea-gathering phase, I always crash back into one universal truth: not many people like writing. I don't think there is ANY idea that I could possibly come up with that would change this fact. In fact, all these ideas aren't going to work because they are all based on the premise that other people would enjoy the excuse to write more, and I just really don't think that's the reality of the situation at this time.
Obviously there are a handful of friends who are freaks like me, and I find so much joy in reading their words on this blog regularly or semi-regularly. But then the other part of this harsh reality is that we're all fucking busy. Everyone has real life that impedes on their blogging time. I totally get it. Somehow, I've found myself in a position for the past eight years or so that allows me to write a little bit in the spaces in-between work obligations. I'm thankful for that, and understand that it's not the norm.
But the summer is almost over, the third summer in a row come and gone with no work promotions on the horizon. I was so fucking stupid, so wide-eyed and naive, back there at the start of the summer of 2023, thinking that new employment horizons were imminent. Now I'm stuck in this rut, and the fucked-up part is that I'm comfortable here, I'm all cozy in my rut, going through the motions and using the downtime to write on a stupid blog. I need a promotion like a caterpillar needs to molt—it's the next step in the process, but I know it's gonna be so fucking painful, I just know it.
Especially the part where I have no fucking clue what space will remain in my life for writing for fun. I've written about this fear before, and like most fears, I will continue to be afraid until my fears actually come to pass. It's possible that I'll get a new job and it'll be busy and I'll have to significantly cut down the time I spend on Puke on Your Birthday.
I'll say "possible" and not "probable," because I'm so fucking burnt out over the question about where the fuck I am at in my career and where I am going and what the fuck is even going on this fucking department in this fucking city. It's possible that I'll get promoted just in the same way it's possible that I'll be sitting in this same fucking cubicle in this same fucking position on the chain of command for 20 more years.
Do I want to have time to write an additional blog post every single day for a whole year? The answer has to be no, because I need something else in my life, and I'm willing to partially (partially, not fully) sacrifice my time on this blog in order for that something else to happen. But I'm so down on myself and my lot here that I can't help but imagine that I will indeed have time to blog to my little heart's content this year and next year and every year until they pour my dead body into a mass grave.
Clearly, this has not been the summer of my dreams. I'm just waiting. Waiting for something to happen. And in the meantime, I'm writing. Writing feels good. Other people should try it. Maybe you'll have another chance to write for fun sometime. Let me know if you're interested, or if you have any ideas. I'm all ears. I have all the fucking time in the world.
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