Saalon Muyo

I’ve never had much of a cause to purposely drop websites off my reading list.  Back before I started pulling everything into Google Reader, I either kept reading or drifted away naturally, one day realizing something had fallen so far off my radar that I hadn’t read it in months.  Thinking back, the few times I got so fed up with something that I stopped came riding giant waves of wrath.  Even things I still gripe about losing their way, like Megatokyo, I still drifted slowly, slowly away from until I stopped caring enough to reload the page.

Now, the annoyances wait in a queue.  There’s no simple failure to load a page up for a week or two.  If you don’t want to read something you’ve got to see the little bold name of the blog in the sidebar, click a button to mark it as read.  Even that button is making you lie about what you’re doing; I ain’t marking it read. I’m saying I never will.

When that goes on for a few weeks, you start asking yourself why you can’t even be bothered to scan over a post or two a day without getting ticked off.  A month or two longer and your relationship with a blogger has become the effort it takes you every day to throw their work in the trash. Blog junk mail, building up on a coffee table.

So now I have to start hitting the unsubscribe button, an explicit statement of Never Again I apparently feel more uncomfortable with that I’d have guessed.  Why else are there a half dozen heads on the chopping block that I haven’t even glanced at for two months? Hell, I haven’t read Paul Krugman for almost a year, and he’s still on there, eating up twenty or thirty seconds a day. I don’t know what I’m afraid of missing eternally that I haven’t missed for months.

Oh, hey, there’s a psychological black hole I don’t want to step into. My inability to step away from something when I should.  My history of sticking with something I long ago came to hate, until I have just enough resentment built up to say something nasty and slam the door.

Yeah, let’s not look at that too closely just yet.

Is there some kind of guidebook for getting back into a project you’ve set down for a while? Because my process feels a lot like redoing great vast chunks of it just to remind myself what the hell I was doing 6 months ago when I thought the thing sounded like a good idea.

As I try to get myself back to putting things on a page that are not written in some non-human language, the current worst part is penetrating the ever-widening wall of fear that springs up between you and something you haven’t looked at in a few hours.  The days where I can alt-tab to Scrivener and see that, yes, there are words from a story I half-abandoned are far enough apart.  Don’t ask me how often I manage to verify those words form English sentences.

But, hey, I hit a milestone, right? Today I’m avoiding looking at it by writing a rubbish blog post. Progress, people.