Somewhere, the day has slipped away from me. And not slipped in the traditional time sense, but in that I thought I had it pinned down, but it was torn off sometime between lunch and now.

That buzz I’d been riding on the news that my undergraduate honors research thesis is finally being published might have had time to mingle with the contents of a conversation I had last night, or that quiet walk home after my bedtime. They annihilated one another in a perfect combination of phase and anti-phase and I’m left with the steady hum of the air conditioning, which is on too high. And the Lucky Charm marshmallow smell of my lip gloss does nothing to make my chapped lips feel better – it just makes the flap of dead skin on my lower lip stick better over the spots I’ve been worrying bloody this afternoon.

That second one has nothing to do with sound. But the aching from my lip is feeding into the aching in the back of my head.

I’m struggling with the restraint I’ve been trying to show this past year.  There are things I want to ramble on about so I can extract them from my own software cycles, but I’m not letting myself. I feel like something’s building. I feel like it’s going to explode.

Hopefully in the form of a piece of art. After all, that’s been the point of the restraint – to keep from skimming everything away from my subconscious, to let things roil a bit. I’ve been trying to examine the effect of this exercise – to see if the act of keeping things to myself can change how I make art or the art I do make.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this post. It’s finally that time –

Time for the first challenge.

I am going to take the next 30 days to make something from this place – my meditation on the importance of secrets.

If you’d like, you can do the same. It can be anything to do with the theme – it can be any type of art. At the end of the 30 days(May 12th) if you have something you want to share, send me a link and I’ll link to it from here, or even post it if you don’t have a forum of your own.

Just remember – it doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be.

Now I’m going to go try and chase down the rest of this day. I think there are eddies in the ventilation system current somewhere in the vicinity of the vending machines.