Feed Reader My Enemy, Feed Reader My Friend

So, I was poking around all the feeds I subscribe to on Bloglines today. But this is not a post about Bloglines, it is a post about unfounded guilt. This morning my 109 feeds had gathered an impressive (but not an all time high of behindness for me) 423 posts by my blogging friends and a bunch of bloggers who don't know me from a hole in the ground.

I get behind, you know. During the week and much of weekend I like to do...stuff. I work, I clean, I run errands, I play with the dog, I pet the cat, I sleep, I eat, I go for walks, I shop, I request ARCs of books I don't have time to read, I dig skeletons out of my internet closet, I watch TV, I peruse periodicals, and on occasion I actually even read books. For some reason that is far beyond me, doing all this stuff doesn't seem to allow me to keep up with a mere (?) 109 feeds. I love my feedreader - everything everybody's writing right there all in one place for me to see at my convenience (or when the guilt of neglecting it begins to overwhelm me), but when I wake up in the morning to 423 posts from a week or two of choosing reading a book (or choosing any of the above listed activities) over reading a blog, something just has to give.

Now that I'm thinking about it, the same obsessive character trait that caused me to accumulate this massive book collection of mine and yet continues to press me onward to accumulate yet more books which I have no space and essentially no time for is the same trait that causes me to overwhelm myself with RSS feeds. I guess if there's anything good out there, anything worth reading, be it on a blog, in a magazine, or in a book - I want to read it...I want to have read it.

But alas, there comes a day in everyone's life when you have to admit defeat (if only a small and momentary one) - when you have to throw out some magazines unread, when you have to comb through those book piles and determine which ones you're really going to read and which ones are just taking up space and encouraging the fanciful thought that you may be able to get to reading all these books in your lifetime while continuing to accumulate them at an unfathomable rate, and when you have to mark all those feeds as read and start anew. The former two I've yet to concede defeat to, but the latter has been done today. So, to all of you people who probably don't even know that I'm reading your blog - accept my sincere guilt and apologies for missing many of your thoughtful posts. I'll do better this week, I promise - but in a few weeks, I'll probably do this again. But I'm trying. And I want to read every excellent looking blog I come across. And I'll probably contintue to overwhelm myself by feeding even more blogs because I just wouldn't be me if I didn't. Being in over my head is as much a part of me as say, my right foot. Because I can't help but believe that if I'm all caught up with everything then it stands to reason that I must not be doing quite enough. Less isn't more, more is more........right?

Tweet