If only I had stuck around for the panda orphanage part.

This is generally how I look while blogging.

Throughout this project of blogging each day during lent, I carry a utopian vision of emerging gracefully from sleep to consciousness in the pre-dawn bedroom, smiling at some tranquil inner thought as tiny songbirds drop a silken gown onto my fit, well-rested frame.  Kissing the boyfriend and the cat with unselfish love, glad that they are able to continue resting their exhausted, useful bodies for many hours yet, and then gliding like an Oedipal siren to my impeccably organized yet down-homey desk where the pieces I compose will go forth and delight a weary world, eventually earning me the first ever Nobel Prize in Blogging (which I will decline with superhuman modesty, quoting Sartre to my adoring fans: “A writer must refuse to allow herself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form. Also, have you been to Stockholm in December?  It is COLD.”)

Here’s what really happens: I wake in a panic, certain that I will not have anything to write, cursing venomously at the cat and the boyfriend because they will sleep for many hours yet, tripping over every possible object – and several non-existent ones – on my way to an office desk still strewn with last night’s ignored tasks, and there I will sit, pinning my reddened eyes open with my fingers, entirely unfit for the task of closing the gap between the empty page and the moment I hit “Publish” (after which I will run around the room like a madwoman because I have left myself only thirty seconds in which to prepare a half-decent look for work and who doesn’t panic when presented with such impossible odds?)

It’s that first scenario, though, the one in which my ego balloons to the size of a blimp, that is the nut of every good writing regime, I think.  You need a healthy dose of total self-delusion if you’re going to remain in pursuit of a goal that earns no material wealth, conflicts with your more practical adult responsibilities, deprives you of rest, and shreds your ego every day until you see the first little spike your Site Stats page, indicating that a few people (probably in the blindness of sleep as they hoover down their first coffee) have accidentally arrived at your blog and stayed longer than 0.3 seconds.

There’s certainly no shortage of the Ego Blimp round here, hammered down at regular intervals by my small but consistent “Reality Cudgel.”  Just last night, for example, I lay in bed reading an article about Joan Didion in which one critic described her as “an extraordinarily narcissistic writer.”  Ego Blimp immediately panicked – “Oh God, is that what I am?” – before Reality Cudgel hit it squarely in the nose: “Girl, you wish you could be in any way like Joan Didion.”

Ego Blimp is useful in other sports, too, such as attempting a recipe that uses the verbs “braise,” or Googling old boyfriends (thanks for the inspiration, April).  The audacity involved in each one can be both empowering and poisonous.  Empowering when you discover that said old boyfriends have done any combination of the following: thickened, balded, divorced, fathered ugly children, gone bankrupt, or cried in public (oh snap, karma!).  Poisonous when the opposite is true: gone Protein Powder fit, married your physical opposite, had cosmically gorgeous children, wrote a book before you did, opened a charity for orphaned panda bears, or moved to Paris and rubbed evidence all over the Internet like a swaggering boxy-jawed mutt.

Even if you are preternaturally forgiving, and bear no ill will towards your ex, Ego Blimp can still shape your Google-Ex experience.  The summer before university started, I worked at a dusty little go-kart track near Wasaga Beach, where I starred in my own after-school disaster by dating the leader of the pit crew, Bradley Morrisson.  His mom owned the only seafood restaurant in Elmvale (pop. 120 when the fair is in town), which gave him a sort of exotic royal status.  He dreamed of… being the leader of the Wasaga 500 pit crew.  Our dates involved sitting in the mini golf hut, eating soft-serve ice cream, and listening to Kool FM.  I wore his silver chain around my neck.  Then one day his sister showed up at the mini golf hut instead of him, and said he wanted the chain back.  Don Henley mocked me from the radio.  It was so hot that my flip flops had fused onto the pavement so I couldn’t even follow her as she walked away.

I got over it about five minutes later.  But I sometimes wonder: what the heck became of Bradley Morrisson?  Is he waiting impatiently for go-kart season to begin again?  Have they raised his salary to minimum wage?  Does he still smell like a shrimp cocktail?  And (cue Ego Blimp) why couldn’t he have left a better Google trail??  I mean, it’s a basic courtesy these days, am I right?  He still owes me $3.75 for the last time we had chicken burgers.  The least he could do is have a public-facing Facebook page and an old abandoned blog I could read.

Here is where I have to find a suitable dismount from this blog post, because while Ego Blimp is certain that I should continue entertaining you with such superior prose, Reality Cudgel is reminding me that I am now in the territory of forgoing a shower in order to get to work on time.  And if Bradley Morrisson’s cautionary tale taught me anything, it’s that one should always err on the side of showering.