I’ve become a parody of myself. I think it started–the day I was born is too easy an answer–on August 16, 2007. That was the fateful day when I made a posting schedule for this site.

Then I made the mistake of following said schedule. Looking back on what I wrote that day, I find it terribly ironic that I fiercely fought against an anonymous boogie man who would hold me to that schedule. It turned out he didn’t need to hold me to it, I do that myself.

So on Mondays I dutifully write reviews. Bad ones. About movies I’ve seen that are old enough to be easy to get my hands on and obscure enough that their age isn’t easy for the public at large to remember. If I haven’t seen any movies that fit that bill recently, I usually scramble together a review of something random that needs no reviewing. I don’t review books because, well, I don’t know how to read.

And then on Tuesday’s I usually write something about the weather. Though the day’s ostensibly reserved for “everyday” topics there are only two things I can manage to fit onto that idea: self-help tripe that I think myself better than, or harmless (and thus meaningless) blather about how the weather’s been. For someone who disdains to talk about the weather in person, the irony of this is inescapable.

By Wednesdays, I’ve usually found a moderately consequential topic of national or international significance on which I can offer vague platitudes that befit my modest level of understanding. I have a strict prohibition against saying anything that will betray my ignorance, and thus tend to say nothing at all. When I come close to saying something, I always make sure to preface it with 100 self-deprecating statements about how “this is just how it looks to me.”

On Thursdays, I desperately hope that I’ve come up with an idea strange enough to write a relatively easy installment of Dispatches. Failing that, I tend to bluff my way to “long enough” by writing something about writing, especially writing on this site. In case you’d forgotten, this was written for a Thursday.

Fridays are meant as a day where I have to do nothing. In order to fulfill that goal, I almost always steal poems from The Writer’s Almanac or passages from books I used to read when I still knew how.

When the weekend comes, I’m ready and waiting to start the cycle of unintentional self-parody all over again.