i never finish anything / a toast to the new year

I'd like to formally apologize for my excessive laziness evident in my lack of bloggage. 

I don't exactly have any sort of acceptable reason for not writing; I've had moments of enlightenment and little epiphanies these past few months that would have been blogworthy, and in a certain state of mind could have been skillfully written enough to be worth reading. But no use in reminding myself of the things I failed to do.

And the worst part of all of this is that it's not like I have actually been busy doing or creating anything. I haven't been invested in a long term project that required vast amounts of attention, nor have I been devoting all of my energy to my studies or some other commitment. Instead I've been simply existing, in somewhat of an etherized fog, allowing my mind to become saturated and consumed by my own pensive (and at times melancholic) thoughts.

So I have spent the past three weeks of winter vacation doing essentially nothing. Which is troubling because I have an insatiable desire to do things. I need to feel like my energy is being spent creating and doing; that in some way, there is tangible proof that I have spent my time doing something fruitful. Yet when I get the "what have you been up to?" text from someone who is actually accomplishing things with their five weeks of vacation, I can honestly say that the only things I have done include watching White Christmas about seven times and reorganizing my iTunes library.

Everyday I think of things I could be doing with my time. And a fair amount of the time, the items on these mental lists are awesome. Going for a long bike ride around town. Going out to lunch with friends. Reading the books I bought last week. Start watching a new TV series. Start making a resume. And each day, approximately none of those things are accomplished. 

Because for some unfortunate reason, I can't finish anything.

I can honestly say I have not finished one thing that I have ever started. 

I have written hundreds of stories, novellas, and poems in probably hundreds of notebooks. None of them are finished. I once wrote a novella that I loved, and I sent it away to a publisher and it came so close to being published--if I made a few edits and sent it back. But I never felt like finishing it, and right now the manuscript is collecting dust in a box with other notebooks of unfinished work.

I have sculpture ideas that will forever remain ideas, existing only as thumbnail sketches in one of my boxes full of notebooks and papers. Projects that were started, and never finished, existing in an awkward limbo of half-completion.

I have shelves and shelves of books I have never fully read, but started. And I used to love reading--I love the stories, I love the characters, I love the emotions and the plotlines. But I never finish books. I will read a page, then reread it, and that'll be the end of that. I might even read a few chapters, then to the shelf it goes for the rest of eternity.

The one thing I came closest to finishing was my 2011 blog challenge. One post everyday for the whole year. When I went abroad, I diligently wrote out my blog posts so I could fill them in when I got back. And there goes another item to add to the list of projects I have never finished. 

I am overflowing with passion for new ideas, and I have such a spark in the beginning to carry out said ideas. A spark so bright that every time, I lead myself to believe that this time, I'll finish, and I'll be so proud once I'm done. That this time will be different, because I am so invested in this project, that there's no way I will abandon it. Until I find it months later in a box, in the exact same state it was in when I started.

So I am bound to this endless cycle of incompletion, resulting only in a growing heap of unfinished projects and exponentially increasing disappointment. It's almost useless to say that my resolution for this year is to finish the things I've begun, because despite how imperative it may be to finish a given project, it simply will not be finished. 

As it is, this blog post was a laborious undertaking.

And as a final note, here is my obligatory nod to the New Year: as I often delude myself with false hopes of finishing anything, let's stay hopeful that 2013 will be more productive and fruitful than was the past year.