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The feeds I read

I’m slowly rediscovering the joys of blogs lately, though trying to recall how & with what tools I was ever able to stay on top of all the juicy feeds & blogs & advice & sundry out there. Why, just today I discovered a comic book with invisible ink dialogue (thank-you, Warren Ellis) & an artist who makes portraits out of pencil shavings (Kyle Bean).

As further organising of my electronic life, yesterday I started re-labelling old email filters, as their folder names had become nonsensical in the march of time, & discovered a folder that’s been quietly collecting the poets.org Poem A Day for, oh, at least a year now (didn’t this thing used to run only in April each year?). I also managed to unsubscribe from about a dozen ‘special offer’ newsletters that, frankly, I never even read. I notice lj tells me I have about 1999 unread messages, but I figure it’s either a) those hundreds of alerts I set up for when my favourite bloggers blogged (which, er, I then stopped reading a while back), or b) all that Russian spam I’ve been getting on my journal.

I remember Lily C blogging about a house move years ago, & some spectacular advice she received: give yourself the gift of more space. That adage always stuck with me. And now I’m using it to dig my way out from under this pile of electronic wreckage. Because that’s what it feels like: wreckage. An online equivalent to the dump where Jupiter Jones secreted his hideaway in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators (hey, what a great bunch of books! I haven’t thought about them in years, but suddenly I’m right back there with Jupiter, Pete & Bob with his weird metal leg cast. What was with that, anyhow?). I’ve been living in the middle of an electronic junkyard for the last year or so, the walls slowly caving in while I stare into a blue screen, oblivious to what’s teetering around me. With the walls punched out, I’ve scored some electronic white space.

Now to remind myself to be selective about what I use that space for.