Blogreading.
When I got back from my holidays my bloglines total stood at about 1500. It is now down to 200. Which I think is pretty neat, and suggests I've encountered about 1800 blogposts in about a week.
A lot of you probably don't even know I'm been near you, unless I left a comment, because for quite a lot of you, the entire post is displayed in bloglines, so there is no need to actually open your blog, unless I want to comment.
This feels like I'm betraying you. I'm not affecting your hit counter, you can't purr with appreciation as yet another returning reader acknowledges a lingering affection.
My commenting rate is low, which suggests that I am not fully participating in your carefully crafted and lovingly presented post.
I'm sort of sorry but not very.
You see, this way, I'm getting through all my blogs and not missing anything. I will be honest, I am deliberately skipping some topics and merely skimming others. Because blogging is rarely about any specific individual post. It's like friendship. It's rarely about a specific thing but about the sum of the parts plus, the ongoing and ever-changing but paradoxically constant.
My bloglines total will mount up again between now and the weekend, but now I know how to manage it, and don't reach in panic for "Mark all as read" daunted by a wall of creativity and reportage and rantage and imagery. I have a spectacularly autistic* way of balancing the reading of the bloghorheac with the timid, of creakingly-old-and-gathering dust with the smell-of-fresh-paint new, with the...enough of these strained metaphors.
Suffice to say that I'm blog reading.
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* I suspect I shouldn't say that, but it really is a word-merger of auditor-tis-she-ick, so you know, I'm using it
