This week’s Prompt For The Promptless is about Meraki, which sounds like a Japanese word, but it’s actually Greek and, strangely, nothing at all like a Meerkat:

Meraki [may-rah-kee]  This is a word that modern Greeks often use to describe doing something with soul, creativity, or love — when you put “something of yourself” into what you’re doing, whatever it may be.

Isn’t that really what blogging is all about? We write these blog posts, hit publish and share a little piece of ourselves with the world. Sometimes, we worry about sharing too much. Other times, we worry that our posts aren’t personal enough or they don’t say what we really want them to say.

I’d like to think that everything I do has a little of myself in it. If we were both to make a pie, yours might look like this:

And mine would probably look cracked and uneven and completely homemade like this:

I inherited sloppy cooking from my mom. We turn a kitchen into a disaster area. I used to get annoyed whenever my cooking didn’t turn out like the picture in the cooking magazine, but not anymore. My family’s cooking is rarely pleasant to look at, it would never be featured in a magazine, but it sure tastes great and that’s really all that matters.

My sister’s favorite pie is cherry. My mom would make homemade cherry pie once in a while and there would inevitably be a cherry pit in there somewhere. Whenever someone found it (most likely by cracking a tooth on it), my grandmother always used to say, “well, that’s how you know it’s homemade.” And that’s pretty much my theory on cooking: the imperfections are how you can tell it’s homemade. Imperfection means character.

As for everything else I do, I’d like to think it’s like my cooking, too. I’d like to believe that my personality is just as apparent in a serious post like The Third Law Of Unfairness as it is in a silly post like Dear Goldfish.

Dear Goldfish has this bit of silliness:

Dearest old mountain,
Why hast thou curs’t our reader?
Please, to remove it.

While The Third Law Of Unfairness says this:

It’s a shitty deal if you ask me. It means that so many evil monsters out there go unpunished.

They’re both me. They’re both my words. I vaguely remember writing both sentences. One is silly and the other is not, but I don’t know a single person who isn’t both at different times. All of my rants, stories, experiences and fiction come from the same place; they’re all mine. They all represent my writing style, my essence, my Meraki.

As for my art, I think it illustrates the point even more succinctly. I’ve already written about how my digital style:

Is so different from my physical style of art:

And how I seem to have a difficult time reconciling the fact that the two very disparate styles are both from me. And the more I think about it, the happier I am that I have so many distinct styles of doing things all within myself. It would be very boring to only do things one way. As it is, with me, you never really know what you’re going to get. No matter how I try, there are typos in my blog posts and I never seem to put as much detail as I should in my digital drawings, but that’s how you know it’s homemade.