Since fall always feels like a New Beginning to me, moreso than January 1st, it is appropriate that my New Year and Day of Atonement fall in September/October.

I am technically Jewish. When I tell people that I am a Jewish Atheist they usually don’t get it. I don’t believe in God, but I still consider myself a member of the tribe. I don’t have the name and the nose for nothing.

Taking the year from September to September, there are plenty of things for which I owe atonement. This I know. This year is the sum of its mistakes, including one so big that I’m sure David would yell at me for merely giving it the label of ‘mistake.’ So far, I have atoned for it the only way I know how – by one days at a time and by the next right thing, by actions and attitudes I was trying to take at this time last year, and failing miserably.

I’m being purposefully vague. Moving on.

I tried out blogging “for like, the world,” at this time last year, but the idea didn’t quite work in practice. Lack of discipline was one of the reasons, my inability to decide what the space was for was another. I’d written in Livejournal so long, directed those words at audiences that no longer existed, and now with a space where I could create my own audience, I was at a loss for how and what to write in it.

People talk about how blogging has changed their life, the real honest to goodness friends they have made through blogging, and that’s something I’d like to do too. The internet has been a source of friendships to me for nearly a decade now. But, just like I stumble socially in real life, I immediately come up with a half a dozen reasons why blogging won’t do for me what it has for dozens if not hundreds of other people. I’m too late to the party with nothing interesting to say and trying too hard.

But I have to write right now. My life is boring and stuck right now, and for the umpteenth time there is nothing I can do about it at this particular moment, but it’s not always going to be that way. I have to believe that, even when I look back on last September, when I was saying such similar things, even though a year later I’m still stuck, I have to believe that this year I’m going to find a way to change that.