It’s a curious thing. I’ve been away for a couple of days working very hard on a project of theoretical remunerative value to my life. But before I left, I wrote some fourteen articles and scheduled them. And it is strange to see the site work on autopilot in that way. It seems less authentic, somehow. But I figure that must just be from my perspective. It ought to look more or less the same from the outside. The only thing I can think is that I probably pick less interesting subjects when I am doing the writing in clumps. But maybe not.

The reason there were only four posts yesterday is because I had planned to be home by around 5:00 last night. Instead, it was closer to 11:00. And I was far too tired to write anything, having been lost in the world of Android development and the OEM Preinstallation Kit — trust me, you really don’t want to know, although I am planning on writing something about it tomorrow over at the Dirt Cheap Computers blog. It just goes to show, you should always over-cram when going away, because you never know.

There is another reason, however. The truth is that it is kind of upsetting to the blogging rhythm to not do it for a couple of days. When I got home, I immediately broke into panic mode: what am I going to write?! In many ways, doing the computer work was kind of a vacation. It’s like housecleaning: so concrete. You know when you’re done. With blogging, you are never done; you are only temporarily caught up. I could be a year ahead and I’d still worry. And I can’t even image what it would be like to come back to that. It would probably make me just stop. (Feel free to make a comment, but take note of who’s reading whom.)

So I’m not clear whether the writing from the last couple of days isn’t better than the writing of today. For example, the article about the maps on The Nightly Show seemed a little thin to me. Usually, I manage to have a bit more to say about a single idea. Republicans Are Not for Smaller Government seems like an argument I’ve made many times before. And of course, this exhausted article is just a bit of a ramble, interesting only to people who care about my life (now numbering zero if you include me) and maybe some people who are interested in the mechanics of running a blog with a semi-rigid publication schedule when you have absolutely no help.

People tell me that I have OCD. And there is no doubt that I do have some symptoms. My favorite is that I can’t stop thinking about jamming my fingers in the cuisinart or having my fingers slammed in a door. But I think we over-analyze ourselves and I would certainly come down on the light side of OCD (although admittedly, right now I cannot stop picturing my fingers slammed in a door jam). Still, it could be that the publication schedule here is a sign of whatever OCD I have. In my defense, if I had it bad, I would have posted something last night to make the five article quota. But the whole thing does seem more compulsion than commitment.

At this late hour, I do feel like I’m back in the swing of things. The problem is that it looks like I will have to go away tomorrow for a couple more days. So normally, you’d be reading about some film (I have a couple of those in the works), but I’ll schedule them for while I’m away. But I probably won’t have time to cram very much, so I will either have to carve out some time for posts, or just fall down on my commitment. We shall see.

Afterword

You can usually tell what I write in real time: it will have only a one in sixty chance of being posted at five past the hour. If it is schedule, it will have a one in one chance of being posted at five past the hour. Why five past the hour? I don’t know. But until there is a good reason to change it (And why would there be?) it will remain that way.