OTB...

If you are a New Yorker of a certain age (including Gen X), the above initials mean Off Track Betting. A place you could go to bet on the horses, without having to be at the race track. In my case, it means “Off Track, BTW” in reference to my social media marketing/posting.

I have an account with a program that allows me to schedule my posts, so I could schedule a month at a time and I am still not doing it. I tell myself that I will sit down on a Sunday and spend one hour on social media and my blog for the coming week. Yet, every time I don’t. This isn’t procrastination. This is ignoring.

So why am I ignoring this task? That’s the $64,000 question. I like to write and my blog is evidence to this. So writing isn’t the issue. Ah, it might be the perfectionist in me. I don’t want to do something till I have it all down pat.

Unfortunately, I may have passed this trait on to my daughter. When she was little and we would draw together, she would get upset because her drawings weren’t as good as mine and crumple them up. No matter how many times I explained that I had studied drawing at art school (I have an associate’s degree in Graphic Design), she still would get upset. So I stopped drawing too. The image for our moving card when we moved into our house was a drawing by my daughter.

A page from my sketchbook drawn on my most recent trip to Asbury Park, NJ

So what have I learned? There is a perfectionist in me. What can you learn? That sometimes logic doesn’t penetrate our child’s brain and so we must find another way to solve the issue. For the record, I carry a sketchbook with me almost every I go and have done so since 1986. Not drawing with my daughter didn’t stop me from drawing, it just made me aware of how much I love it and wanted to share it with my daughter.