45 x 365 Wrap Up

• When you start writing about people in 45 word bites, you start to think about them in 45 word bites. When you're talking to someone, you are likely to ponder what their most intriguing characteristic is and how you can describe them quickly. You also start to parse apart quickly whether or not your overall impression of people is positive or negative. Sometimes this means you stop giving people a chance. I think if I were to rewrite some of my synopses from the first hundred later on, I might have changed my outlook and tone regarding some of those individuals.
  

• It's difficult to write about people you know really well in 45 words. There's too much to say and too many scenarios to play out to make the description pop just the way you want it to. It's also difficult to write about people you don't know really well. Then 45 words is just too many. There are only so many ways to say a person is boring.
  


• Speaking of boring, hey, maybe I could use a thesaurus once in a while. I used the words always and never(68 times!) almost as many times as I used the word the (okay, fine, a lot more than 68). A word frequency of the words I used in my 45 x 365 pieces tells me that I should work on my vocabulary. According to WordCounter, if you take out all the common words in the English language from my posts, here's what I'm left with: never (68), you're (59), one (49), know (49), life (47), time (41), think (39), and other boring one syllable words. The only adjectives and nouns worth mentioning were laugh (34), kind (32), and friend (30). It's somewhat disconcerting to learn that the vast majority of my written words are small and useless.
  
  
• The entire project was fun, but I'm glad it's over. Finding time to write them was more difficult than I initially presume it would be. Even if I only spent 7 or 8 minutes on each one, it still morphed into 7 or 8 minutes each day that I sometimes was angry I had to spend. Hence the occasionally skipping and naughtiness.
  


• In the end, these short descriptions of people said a lot more about me than they did about the people I was writing about. That was an entirely unintended consequence. I thought it would help me write more descriptively, but in the end it served more of the purpose of me grouping people - past, present, future, adders or subtractors to my life, friend or foe, right or wrong. I had to cut through the frill and get to the heart of people in my life and acknowledge some strange grudges I should probably get over.


• Since this is my record, I'll just say that I have many favorites among these. The mostly fall into three categories: people I love (184, 215, 217, 316, 359, and 361), people who taught me about the perils of aging (88 and 134), and people who I have ambivalence about (71, 277, and 327). I found a lot of these to be difficult to write - ambivalence makes for more challenging writing, but now that they are written, I love to read them and savor my opinions from that time in my life.