Fragments of Unfinished Posts

Sometimes it takes me months or years to write a blog post. More often than that, though, I start and then never finish posts that I don't feel right about for one reason or another.

Last night, I was going through drafts of unfinished posts and thought I'd share.

First, a fragment from a Christmas post that I eventually restarted and finished. It took me a good two years to write up what I was trying to say. Here's how part of the beginning originally went:

"Right this way," said the hostess. She started to take us to the fun part of the restaurant, where little wooden dividers separate everyone from everyone else so it's like being alone in a jungle of neon lights and plastic booth seats. And in that jungle, you can feel free to be yourself because it's just you and the people sitting with you. Also the waiter. Your secrets are safe with the waiter.

I also found a post titled "My Life as a Hobbit." It was a post trying to explain why I love hobbits so much. Also why I prefer the animated version of The Return of the King to the live-action movie. It was scattered, at best. The two memorable lines that I want to preserve are:

On a perilous quest to find my SAT scores in the depths of my bedroom, I stumbled across an unevenly cut piece of paper covered with my pre-teen scrawl.

and

If you like dragons, dwarves, and the white pony wearing sparkly armor, then you should not watch this movie. There are no dragons in this movie. No dwarves. And no sparkly-armor-clad ponies.

I also started a post called "The Road Goes Ever, Ever On." That's more hobbit stuff, for those of you unfamiliar. It was a post explaining why I decided to leave the country a few years ago. I will probably use that title eventually for a travel post, but it will be markedly different from the draft I stumbled across.

There was also a post about why my family loves Disneyland so much. That one just did not come together very well. I may try again at some point. I'd share a bit, but it's not that good.

Penultimately, I found a post called "Adventures in Book-Selling." This post was meant to describe my brief stint of unemployment during my last year of college. I'd felt like I should quit my fast food job but not look for another job for a little while. Strange as that was, I went ahead with it. In the two months where I didn't work, I tried to sell my textbooks on Amazon. Selling textbooks on Amazon would have been a lucrative career...if I hadn't been in college (the textbooks had to be mailed within a certain number of hours after the order was placed, which conflicted mightily with my school schedule) and if I'd had an unlimited supply of packaging (sometimes packaging and shipping cost more than the profits I made from the book).

This post didn't get very far, but here's what I opened with:

It's one thing to be in the grips of The Neediness. It's another thing entirely to be under the shadow of The Nothingness.

If The Neediness is when you care too much and feel extremely insecure, The Nothingness is when you don't care enough and are so self-satisfied you can't imagine changing whatsoever. The Neediness is unsteady, but The Nothingness is stagnation.

It probably would have been a real chipper post.

The last thing I found lost in the annals of Blogger was actually not a post. It was a draft that I filled with text messages copied off my phone. That way, I could delete texts off my phone to make room while still having a copy of the ones I wanted to remember. Such as:

Best Friend Boy: No problem. It was very nice to catch up. :)

And there we have it. All of the unfinished stuff floating around on Blogger. Hope you're gladdened by being able to see it, even if it's not in the originally intended form.