The Puzzle of the Piddle and the Polish, or, What a Difference a Tweak Can Make

I guess you should never count your endorphins before they’re dispatched, but it seems as though the dark mood I experienced in May has gone away and I live to create another day. Rhyme is always a sign that I’m having a better time.

The muck and murk of May, however, was really only half the problem. I’d been struggling with a problem for a very long time, a problem we’ll call the Puzzle of the Piddle and the Polish.

Part 1. I Begin to Piddle

Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away (It might have been this one), I started a little experiment in which I committed to posting at least one sentence to a blog every day.

What fun I had. Everything was easy and breezy. I posted whatever I wanted: poems and pictures and half-written stories and a host of other piddlings.

And that was the thing about that little experiment. I felt free to piddle and post what I piddled, because, after all, no one was reading it.

I was always aware that someone could read my blog. That was why I made it public. Knowing that someone might see it one day somehow held me accountable and made me feel less alone.

Posting my piddles in public saved me from trying to stick to my commitment, all by myself, somewhere in a dark and dingy basement. At least it felt that way.

Part 2: People Start Peeking

But then something wondrously odd happened. People actually started reading the stuff I was posting and leaving comments as well.

“Oh-oh” I remember thinking, “I have an audience.”

And having an audience, especially one I grew to adore, made me think they deserved something more than mere piddles. I wanted to give them some polish.

That’s why I started this blog, a thing more polished than the piddly original.

For a while, I tried dividing my time between the two blogs, but I’ve always been a one-woman man and, for now anyway, I seem to be a one-blog man, too.

Part 3: I Get Blogged Down

And that’s when I began to struggle. To piddle or to polish: that became the question.

I’m just not able, it seems, to produce a polished post each and every single day. I’m more adept at piddling. In fact, I have a terrible need to do so. Without it, I have a hard time finding things to polish.

So what’s a blogger to do?

Part 4: I State the Problem

My solution came when I finally stopped struggling and settled down to examine the problem, the Puzzle of the Piddle and the Polish.

The problem can be stated as such: I want to keep my commitment to posting at least one sentence every day, because I have a need to piddle and post what I piddle, but I want to give my readers something polished.

Part 5: I Tweak the Problem

“Hmm,” I thought, “all my problems begin with P.” So I started substituting other P words for the ones I was staring at, and POW, I had my answer.

I didn’t have to post everything I piddled. I only had to publish it, and that could just as easily take the form of a page as it could a post. I could give polished posts to my readers and build pages and pages of piddles just below the surface.

Part 6: I Live to Piddle Another Day

And that’s how I came up with Odd Things, the section you can see just above the header. It’s published so it’s public, which means you can peruse it if you wish. But you’re also free to ignore it completely. I just had to put it there.

I changed one word and felt as though I had changed just about everything and set myself free.

What a difference a tweak can make. But then, that’s the power of piddling, isn’t it?

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