Happy New Year.  2012 can kiss my arse.  2013 is going to be better.  I woke early after less than 4 hours sleep and decided I would start the year by hand-writing a letter to someone that had asked me to.  I will call him “wizard”.

I took out my writing book.  I unscrewed the ink dispenser (last loaded with a blend of brown/black ink) and cracked a cartridge.  It was green, the only colour ink I could find. (Trevor found it for me, actually, whilst I was packing.)  It has been so long since I used my fountain pen, I can’t actually get the ink to flow back into the nib.  I have sucked and blown.  Sucked the nib, blown down the tube.  When I was a baby, I used to suck my dad’s fountain pen.  I think I ingested so much ink that eventually he kept it unfilled.  (Sucking my dad’s nib.  There is an Oedipus joke in there somewhere! 🙂 .)  My fingers are covered in ink and there are concentric and ever-lightening brown circles on an envelope.  But still no easy green flow.

Whilst I was doing this, I notice a handful of letters stuffed in a side pocket.  I don’t even remember them.  There are love letters from my first boyfriend, heart-felt missives from star-crossed (almost) lovers, and letters from my best friend.  Wow – the written word, indeed.

I got distracted reading these instead of writing to the wizard.  It’s all right 🙂 .  He will forgive me.  Maybe it is the age we were at when we wrote these letters to each other – there was no email, no Facebook. The sentiment in them is raw, it is honest, it is romantic.  Have we lost this in this face-paced life in which we live?  When I was in India, my parents had to write to me post-restante, guessing where I would be when their letters arrived.  Mostly I received them.  Sometimes I did not.  In this life, there are no guarantees.

The wizard says he is taking a month off electronic devices.  Even the telephone. I admire him.  Since writing this blogpost, we have texted, and I have changed his name to “wizard”.  You can UNDO the typed word, you can only cross-out the written word.

I believe multitasking is killing our brains.   The notebook and pencil I keep in my pocket is helping, but I don’t have the will-power not to constantly reach for my phone.

What can I do to stop that?  What would Jesus do? 😉  (“Who would Jesus bomb?” goes the joke.  It is funny until you think about it.)  What would (non-existent) god do if he had to distribute the 10 commandments over Twitter or Reddit?

I don’t believe in God.  (ESPECIALLY with a capital ‘G’.)  How can I have lost faith and now start to believe in a ‘G’od that would take my babies?  But maybe I believe in a master plan.

Can’t wait to see what 2013 holds in store for me.