I think the idea of keeping up a blog is a charming, weirdly outdated thing, but I still feel the compulsion to keep one. I've thought a lot recently about the impermanence of connection in the digital world I choose to live and work in.

Admitting you're in over your head is hard. It hurts. I don't know anyone who enjoys it, and I don't know any fellow perfectionists who can do it without feeling a great deal of shame, hesitation, or remorse.

Just so everyone's clear: it's not you, it's me.

I have 'fond' (those are air quotes) memories in the past of people pronouncing "I'm leaving!" in a huff, while taking a big pause at the metaphorical door (these are online communities we're talking about here, so all doors are metaphorical) to see if anyone cried out "Noooo! Don't leave us!"

There's a difference between doing what I just described, and recognizing that you are overloaded and distracted and just pulling the plug without telling anyone ahead of time.

There are several simple signs that the crud has successfully knocked me on my ass, but the biggest sign of all is that I have been home since Friday night (and as of this writing it is now Tuesday afternoon) and though I have been on the couch most of that time, have I posted here?  No.  I'm just now feeling capable of stringing sentences together with some hope of achieving subject-verb agreement, and if I get wordy, even that's gonna get a bit dicey.

I'm unwilling to explain more at this time, but:

Just because something's right doesn't make it easy.

That's all.

A little voice inside my head said,
"Don't look back. You can never look back."

A day late, but for once, perhaps not quite a dollar short.

We are not date-obsessed people. We have spent anniversaries apart over the years. We passed 'couple' and 'handful' and are rapidly lazing our way toward double digits, and yet ... here we still are.

Perspective says how utterly young and naive we were on that day. We probably haven't learned much, but at least we have a mortgage to show for it.