I admire my buddy Charles for just not giving a fuck when it comes to maintaining his otherwise excellent blog, Liminality. He says he writes the blog mainly for himself, and doesn't care about how big his readership is. I believe him. But Charles does seem prone to pangs of conscience about not posting, and these happen frequently enough that they form a rather humorous pattern. Here, going back in time, is a sampling of Charles's expressions of regret (or in some cases, "regret") for not having posted in a long or a short while.
I didn’t really mean to leave things in limbo like that with my last post. I fully intended to post once more—at least a brief note—before I left on a trip to the States for a month. But I ended up being so busy before the trip that I did not have time for that, and here we are over a month later.
—from August 1, 2014
And another month of silence goes by—but I finally have a good excuse for breaking that silence.
—from June 8, 2014
It has been another long while—roughly three weeks now—since my last post. As usual, it was not necessarily because I did not have the time to post, but because I did not really feel like posting.
—from May 6, 2014
After a flurry of posting at the beginning of last month, I have somehow managed to yet again let over a month go by between posts. That is due in part to the fact that I have been trying to adjust to my new job and our new apartment, but I must admit that I have also been a bit lazy when it comes to setting aside time for Liminality.
—from April 15, 2014
It has been well over a month since my last post, and you, my imaginary but faithful reader, may have been wondering where I went. The answer is New Zealand, for three weeks. It was not my original intention to leave without a word.
—from February 20, 2014
Let’s hope that 2014 sees a lot more content here on Liminality; I will be the first to admit that last year was a bit on the sparse side.
—from January 9, 2014
And just like that it has been some five weeks since my last entry. Obviously I did not intend to let so much time pass.
—from November 13, 2013
A little over a month ago, on the 17th of May, Hyunjin and I visited the newly rebuilt Namdaemun... This would have come a lot sooner, but our trip to London forced me to put a lot of things on the back burner. This was one of them. “Better late than never” is my motto.
—from June 24, 2013
This is just a quick note to say that we are now back from London. We have been back for several days, in fact, but it’s taken me that long to get around to writing this, as I have been preoccupied with trying to get back into my normal rhythm.
—from June 11, 2013
As promised, here is the first of three journal entries to come before the end of this month. It is something I should have written a long time ago, and something that I did in fact start to write about a month ago. But I got bogged down and lost interest, and it is only through a supreme act of will that I managed to finish this. I can’t promise that it will necessarily be enjoyable to read, but it is something I had to do.
—from May 19, 2013
This is going to be very short, but I just wanted to post something here to let everyone know that, after over two weeks, Liminality is finally back in action. It’s a very long story that involves intrigue and corruption at the highest levels of government, with rogue secret agents risking their lives to see the truth uncovered, and—wait, no, actually, it’s a rather mundane story involving a malware attack, hosting woes, and deprecated code, but it’s still pretty long and there is no way I am going to write it all tonight. But I have deliberately avoided posting anything for the past two weeks, and I just wanted to let all three of my regular readers know that I am back.
—from April 2, 2013
...and I think that's about it for 2013. I'll stop there, having busted Charles's balls enough. Oh, wait—one last thing: in his most recent post, Charles claims to have gone back through his archives and to have discovered that he had only twice ever gone over a month without posting. As you can see from the above quotes, it was more than only twice. Heh.
_
Friday, August 01, 2014
the many regrets of Dr. Charles La Shure
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Ha, that's funny. Yes, I do have pangs of conscience about not posting for long periods of time. I think from now on I will try to come up with more creative reasons for not posting.
ReplyDeleteBut you did misinterpret my statement about "missing a month." Notice that I did not say that I went a month without posting. That happens a lot, as you know. What I meant was that I did not post in a particular calendar month (in both cases, July). There have been many times when that has happened, but I have always tried to get at least one post in for each calendar month. This is the second time I failed.
C,
ReplyDeleteI read this:
"By the way, this is only the second time in Liminality’s history that I have missed an entire month (I had thought it was the first, but going back through my archives I see that I also missed July 2009)."
...which, to my mind, can be interpreted either way: either as a 30-day/31-day period—a literal month's worth of time—or as a calendar month, if by "calendar month" we mean "the period of time that falls inside the scope of a single month's name" (if I'm phrasing that concept correctly).
So: what you wrote was open to interpretation, in my opinion.
To see the ambiguity more clearly, let's do a rewrite:
"By the way, this is only the second time in Liminality’s history that I have missed an entire 30-day/31-day stretch (I had thought this was the first, but I see I also missed the 31-day stretch of July 2009."
Clunkier prose, but you get the point.
Well, you interpreted it the way you did, so there's obviously some ambiguity. I would have thought that the parenthetical, where I specifically mentioned July, would have cleared up the ambiguity, but I guess it did not. I'm not going to argue the point, though, and I'm not going to do a rewrite, because honestly I doubt anyone else cares.
ReplyDeleteTo the larger point, though: I think the reason I feel these "pangs of conscience" when not posting is not necessarily because I feel that I have let my readers (if I do in fact have any other than you and my mum) down, but because I have let Liminality down. Hmm. That sounds really weird now that I type it out. But I think of the site as a sort of sentient being, and the act of writing is how I feed this being. That's just a metaphorical way of talking about the part of me that needs to write, of course. So I guess I'm just apologizing to myself (even if I do something address hypothetical readers to do that).
ReplyDeleteI know you're at least half joking, but I seriously doubt it's just me and mother among your readership.
ReplyDelete