Tag: dailyprompt

Week 9 Post 3: Dear 100-year-old Me

On By MaryIn 2025, Prompts, WritingLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.
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I turned 40 last year. I never really felt old at 30, although it was the age that most young people resented approaching, viewing it as “old.” It helped to some degree that my mom had me in her late 30s. I was still a kid when she hit 50, and that was the decade she spent my teen years in. So it was 50 that I viewed as old when I was a kid, and 30 didn’t really bother me at all. In fact, I quite enjoyed my 30s. I didn’t feel rushed or left behind. 30 still seemed quite comfortably capable of brewing and turning into something.

I’m starting to feel a little old at 40 – or at least, too old for things to begin. It feels like I should be in a stage of life where what I have has already been built firm under my feet and certain. In truth, I’ve made very few big strides in my life up until now. It seems I’ve spent the past two decades coasting, and I’m not certain how much will actually change in the next decade, because time seems to slip by, faster now, uncontrollable grains of sand running their course. It seems just as likely that the following decades can be full of the same empty hope as the previous decades.

When you’re young, you think about being the youngest to accomplish a thing. And then you hear about someone young (or your age) who did the thing, and you think you’ll be just on their heals (Eragon released when I was a teenager). And then you think you’re accomplishing things at a normal rate, other people have done the thing by your age. And then you reach an age where you reassure yourself with the tales of people that didn’t accomplish the thing until later in life (Tolkien didn’t write LoTR until he was in his 40s!). I seem to be hitting that age now. Reminding myself that things can still be done.

So I sometimes morosely feel like 40 is old. But there is also a part of me that feels like it’s not quite yet. Especially when I contemplate it from another angle. How much more life would I have to live to reach 100? 60 more years. That’s an entire life! It’s more than I’ve lived to date. My mom had me at 38, and my brother at 40, and she has been around to watch us grow into adults. There is yet a full life to live, even if I only build it starting today.

And if I build it today… 60 years down the line, when I’m 100, what has it become?

There could still be an entire life in that time. A full life.

I wonder what you do with it?

(although writing a letter to your 100 year old self seems silly, most of us won’t live that long, could get hit by a car tomorrow, which is usually my go to example but maybe a bit dark considering my boyfriend got hit by a car last year. he’s fine though.)

Week 7 Post 1: Unintentional

On By MaryIn 2025, Random, WritingLeave a comment

Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?

Unintentional instances of law breaking usually include theft. In general, I’m very respectful of other people’s property (I might hide something though, that’s maybe not super respectful, I guess) and I’ve always been financially lucky or stable enough that I’ve never felt the need to steal. I don’t really get any sort of thrill from such things as other’s might. I think perhaps the most egregious intentional thefts were some food and drinks while working at a fast food place as a teenager, which if you have worked food service, you know is fairly rampant. So the list is small and accidental:

Once pocketed a silver mercury dime at work intending to switch it out with a normal one from my car, but completely forgot it was in my pocket until I got home. Later, I did the same with a buffalo head nickel.

One year I decided to buy a nice big pot to try to grow some flowers in. I was quite unsuccessful, but kept trying every other year. At the end of one such unsuccessful season, after having owned the pot for about 5ish years, I emptied it and went to go rinse it out and it appeared to fall apart in my hands. Upon further investigation, I discovered it was actually two pots stuck together. I had only needed one, been convinced it was one, so had only paid for one. The inner one still had the barcode on the bottom. Whoops?

Also a semi-intentional one: we had a girl working in the pharmacy that would grab the occasional toy and leave it without buying it in the pharmacy. It was during the time that fidget spinners were really popular, so she had brought a nice hefty metal one in. It hung out in the pharmacy so long and had been messed with so much that it no longer had a barcode and we no longer even sold the item. We had to do a deep clean and remove a lot of clutter, so we were going to just throw it away. I decided to take it home instead.

A hardened criminal, indeed.

Sidequests Week 4

On By MaryIn SidequestsLeave a comment

My sidequests for this week were pretty simple ones. I was to take a virtual tour of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, learn out to say hello in a different language, and take 5 minutes to visualize a positive future for myself.

I had to Google the Smithsonian one, as that wasn’t something I was aware existed. Apparently there are several available to choose from. I browsed the exhibit about the Wright brothers. It’s interesting, and the image quality is high enough that you can read most of the text through the exhibit with the exceptions of really small text set further away from the designated “standing spots” or the occasional area where there is glare from lighting. It’s a fun idea that gives a broad strokes feel for the exhibits on display, but a poor substitute for actually going. For one, I like to get close and look at things, and read everything. There are also screens that looked like they had video displays for the exhibits, and seeing a picture of something from a few different angles is not quite the same as looking at it in person.

Also, I’m the sort of nerd that loves going to museums. If you really like those particular subjects and lack the funds to go, it’s a suitable substitute, though, and worth checking out.

For learning to say hello in another language, I used Google again. (Google has all the answers, right?) They’ve got their list of languages you can translate, and I kind of browsed some of the options to look at them. I found that there were some that I already knew but had never really thought about. Most interesting to me was Italian. Apparently, similar to Hawaiian “aloha,” “ciao” can mean both hello and goodbye. I had only ever understood it to be a goodbye, so that caught me a little by surprise.

While I technically already knew the word, I did manage to recontextualize it properly, and understand it more in line with its actual meaning.

The last one is the hardest for me. Not because I have a hard time being positive, but more because I have a hard time being specific. Most of my life I’ve had a very lax attitude about my personal direction. I’ve always felt: if it happens, it happens. Great! If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Also great! I don’t mind the idea of falling in love – but if I don’t find a lover, I’m not going to rush and settle just to have ticked marriage off the box. Similar with having kids – I don’t mind the idea of having kids, but I’m not going to get into a tizzy and go get knocked up because I feel I have to.

They’re nice futures to have, but not necessary ones. And those are just the two major examples that people are likely to wonder on most, but I have a similar attitude towards most things in life. So trying to specify what I want in a “positive future” is hard to pin down, because as long as I’m enjoying myself I don’t care.

Things that would be nice and positive: a windfall of money, which would help anyone. How many people would ever turn down an extra cash windfall? Although this also ties into the recent writing prompt that wordpress posted for Bloganuary!

Bloganuary writing prompt
What would you do if you won the lottery?
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A fun daydream that everyone has. What would you do if you won the lottery? I would likely be too nervous to initially spend it. I would sit on it until I understood how it affected things tax wise. It also depends on how much you won. If the take home was roughly $1 million dollars, I could live on that quite comfortably for 20 years, but any big expenses will cut into that semi-retired life quite dramatically. Buy a new car? Have a new house built or pay off my current home and make improvements to it? Or any number of big money splurges that cuts into that take home will result in less time that I can go without working.

Of course, if you got someone to help you manage your financials and invested properly, and refrained from blowing it all at once, you could live quite comfortably without having to work again.

So, without work, what would I do with my time? I’ve heard plenty of people gripe about their retirement when they felt useless, but I’ve never had that problem. I would love having more time to take classes on interesting things and visit places I haven’t been. I love working on art and writing projects. I love sleeping in, and reading and playing games, and watching movies and shows. I could go to the gym in the middle of the night when it’s dead quiet, and spend time learning new recipes without having to worry about how long cooking and clean up will take, because I have to wake at a specific time to be at a specific place for a specific set of hours in a day.

As for more attainable positive things – I would like to try to vegetate less and work on my projects more within the next year. And lose weight. And finish my story I started last year and begin the editing process so I can maybe slap it on self publishing on Amazon near the end of the year and accomplish a life long goal of mine to publish some bullshit. Those are also all positive things.

….I took several more minutes than 5 to visualize all that. But it works!

Sleep

On By MaryIn Prompts, WritingLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?
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Choosing a prompt to respond to because: got lazy! And somewhat in relation to the prompt, took a nap in the afternoon instead of writing. But I have pulled my cards and have something of an idea for it at least when I post next week.

Generally my sleep schedule can change up quite a bit owing to my work schedule. For the most part, my boss usually gives me closing shifts (or what counts as closing for us – we close at 7 pm) because I enjoy sleeping in and don’t mind working in the evenings. A lot of our employees usually prefer day shifts because they have children or would like to be off earlier in the day. As a result, I go in to work anywhere between 10 am to 12 pm, and will usually sleep in to about 45 to 30 minutes before I am due for work. On days when I don’t have to work, I can easily sleep in until nearly 1 pm.

I’m also a night owl, so I’m up pretty late. I rarely go to bed before 2 am. There are exceptions on days when I am just completely drained and crash early, or when (like today) I take a nap. There are even some nights when I am up until sunrise.