It’s strange reading your blog lately – you seem to be in such a different world, such a different state of mind than me. It’s kind of a nostalgic, vacationing vibe, like there’s infinite time to think about that tiny leaf on the end of a fern frond – no, not the littlest one at the end (all proud because of its important location) but the fifth one in on the left, ignored for no good reason by everyone else throughout history. But it’s not your writing – everything seems different, skewed, changing, because I have few consistent relationships with people.

I adore and cherish each long letter I recieve. Somehow they always seem a labor of love. Every one of them. From one of my oldest and dearest friends, I thought it was too great not to reflect on it a bit…as he so eloquently called out my navel gazing.

I’d been thinking about ways to get myself off the rss bandwagon and back to actually reading blogs. Lately I sit down at the computer, click onto google reader, quickly go through my friend’s feeds, whiskey river, Maud Newton, the Sartorialist, and my friends shared items (watch this one, she’s a ninja). Then its back to checking twitter, tumblr and wandering why the web isn’t as fun as it used to be. The news items build up too fast and the blurbs are to short to merit any actual reading. The music blogs usually link the song or the videos in the actual website, so I end up with a bunch of tabs that I never get around to working all the way through.

I agree with Mr. DesignNotes guy, blog reading feels like a chore. Its sitting down with the NY Times sunday edition and trying to read every single headline in the paper, skimming through every single article. When reader usually has 1000+ unread items it feels like wading through an insurmountable task. I’m not 100% sure that his crazy elaborate system would work for me, but  there has to be a better way for me to ingest information  on the web.

How, on the other hand, can I remember the blogs I’d like to read and make it back on a regular basis? I’m open to new solutions or ideas.

Until then I’ll keep adding blogs like DesignNotes to the reader and marking half the new items as read.

When I started writing teenybooks in 2005, it was a simple pleasure. I found things off the web, I occasionally wrote personal anecdotes, I posted about artist (of the music and writing variety) that I enjoyed and mostly just clowned around. After restarting my blog and slowly got into tumblr, well tumblr got all the fun posts and teenybooks mostly got everything else.

It feels too serious all the time. While I’d like to maintain the integrity of the site, sometimes I find things on the web that I really just want to talk about as well and I find myself just slapping it on m.i.n.e. with a link and waiting till I can integrate it into conversation with my circle of friends that follow the site through tumblr.  Hopefully in the next few months that’ll change a bit.

Keep following.

teenybooks ain’t dead yet.

(Its also been a little over three years that teenybooks has been an active site.)

My Wordle

We’ve nearly reached the end of my blogger blogging era. I’ve been playing with the idea of drastically changing my blog since a little before the New Year. So here it is, April and I’m excited to be nearly there, it had gotten to the point that everything about blogger’s clunky back end design had begun to annoy me. Posting photos was still a chore, the look of the actual blog was bad and I still didn’t have my own domain name.

The change isn’t quite complete, since I’m still playing with everything and figuring out the look (I keep talking about the mysterious banner at the top which will be created through my own cunning and genius…well not really…I’ve got lots of creative friends), but quite soon.

I will keep the archives here active as long as blogger will allow. It would be ashame to lose my virtual documentation of the past three years.