If I had more of a marketing brain (the marketing portion of my brain is tucked away somewhere near the areas devoted to vestigial gills and DOS commands), I could have jazzed up my accordion process by making it more suspenseful.
It seems to me that the most effective way to do this is to put a time limit on it: I will cook my way through Julia Child in a year, I will not buy anything from one January to the next, I will learn to manufacture my own acrylic nails with seasonal motifs in the basement ... no that's silly, that last one doesn't have a time limit.
If I were a smart cookie, my accordion project, instead of being open-ended and somewhat diffuse, could instead have been something like: I will play my way through the collected bandoneon works of Astor Piazolla in one year. Ready, set, go! -- Or, closer to reality, I will become the world's leading exponent of "Charlie the Chimp," one note per month. And they're off!
Instead, it has been much more than a year, and international fame owing to mastery of "Charlie the Chimp" still eludes me. This is not for lack of trying! But it may be due to a certain lack of focus.
Because the accordion is not my only project -- far from it! This year alone I have embarked on two completely different projects, both of which must be completed by December 31, 2012. If you are thinking: My God, the pressure must be killing her! -- you are right.
Either alone would be daunting. But I choose to perform both of these challenges in the same year. Why? Because I am afraid that otherwise I will forget them, like everything else.
1. I will read all the Dickens novels in one year.
No joking. And I'm already a month behind because I only thought of it halfway through February. There are Dickens novels I have read and am very fond of, and others that I imagine I am fond of but it turns out I have never read. Never, ever. Like about three quarters of them.
So Dickens's bicentenary seemed a good time to rectify the situation, and make an honest woman of myself. And also maybe focus my mind enough to finish something besides another Michael Connelly or Sara Paretsky audiobook.
I'm starting with the Pickwick Papers, which is a slower go than I had imagined. I am working through it in book form, ebook library download and audiobook simultaneously. Wish me luck.
2. I will get rid of a book a day.
You heard me -- one a day. Each and every day of this year I am culling one book, read or unread, hard cover or soft, English or in some aspirational language I don't actually read.
So far I have selected 52 books for slaughter recycling. They are spilling out of a red Knob Hill shopping basket on the floor. It is all I can do to stop myself from sneaking out of bed in the dead of night and restoring them to their rightful place on the shelves.
There is always a good reason to keep a book. Unread? Might read it someday. Read many times already? Will miss it when I inevitably crave reading it again. Ancient yellowing copy that will fall apart if ever opened? Obviously a collector's item. Written in ancient Sumerian? You never know ...
Still, the first month was pretty easy. But I know that soon the going will get tough, and then tougher. I can't think what I'll be like in September -- a hollow-eyed ghost of my former self, I should think, pacing the house while wringing my hands and muttering about all the perfumes of Araby.
I'm already thinking of handing off March to Michael, and making him get rid of 31 of his books instead. Why should I bear all the responsibility for creating airy designer shelf space in our home?
I'll even offer him a handicap: each golf magazine counts as a book.
Are we on?
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