Announcing: The Week of Wonder

I have done That Thing I never meant to do. I have gone and whined on the internets. *Oh me. Don’t you feel sorry for me with my crappy job and all my unfulfilled wants?* Yeah, I know. It hurts. Me too.

I’ve had wishing blogs before. You know the kind? Where I as author prattle on and on about all the things I would do if I had the time. Or the energy. Or the inspiration. And I distinctly did not want this blog to be a monument to whatever it is I hope I could become.

No, instead odd pear was going to be about all things that I am doing. Odd pear was going to be my excuse to bravely try anything I thought I might like to do. Whether the attempt is successful or not is really beside the point. Because revision is the key to anything that works. Which is to say that the something that works does so because there have been many (sometimes many, many) preceding drafts that did not work at all.

In fact, maybe I’ve just struck upon a way to cast last week’s whinefest: drafts.

At any rate, what’s important now is that I do something to return my sense of wonder and delight with the world. If pressed, I can think of nothing more wondrous and delightful than Polaroids. Really. How else to explain a mechanism that creates an image before your very eyes – but slowly – through some mysterious, alchemical process? I would even go so far as to suggest that if the alchemists of yore knew they could strive for something as magical as Polaroid film, they might have deserted their quest for gold long before their noxious raw compounds made them crazy as loons. Just a thought.

But now – where was I? Oh yes. It just so happens that I have recently eBayed myself a nice little Polaroid OneStep (the '80s kind). I have yet to discover if it actually works, but why let a little consideration like that stop me? What I’m proposing here is one week of nothing but Polaroids. The Week of Wonder, let’s call it. Because there is something about the view through the lens of a Polaroid camera that transforms anything and everything in life from ho-hum to oh my! Also, because ‘Roid Week is taken. Anyway, I live with a nurse who, though he is generously unmoved whenever I call our Sunday morning bloody marys BMs, is liable to groan audibly every time he hears me flit about the house declaiming, “It’s my very own ‘Roid Week, baby!” And you know what? Secretly I could never blame him for that.

So – Week of Wonder. For one, entire, seven-day week. Starting tomorrow. (Tomorrow is always the best time to start something, don’t you think?)

Risking presumptuousness, I will say that if anyone else is interested, that would be rad, frankly. I’d love to see it. Your Week of Wonder needn’t be the same week as mine. In fact, it would be awesome to see a cascading orgy of wonder, happening at any point throughout the year. A loosely defined experiment in wonder that might even require its own Flickr group (wow).

Or, um (keeping the grandiosity at bay), just me is cool too. But do, please, send me a note or leave a comment if you've decided to join in. Just because it's more fun that way.

See you tomorrow. With Polaroid.

mwah!