Word count: 3168 | Since last entry: 2657

I’ve been horribly discombobulated since we returned from our trip. While we were in Europe, and then stranded in Washington, my regular life was on hold… we weren’t even doing the usual holiday things. I was, for example, looking at my email but setting all the action items aside for later. We had so many false starts and disappointments on the way home, followed by additional bad weather once we finally got here, that somehow I never really got back to my everyday life.

In the past couple of days I’ve tried to address the issue by making to-do lists each day and trying real hard to do everything on them — on the theory that the best way to make yourself feel good is to do stuff. Results have been mixed — I’ve accomplished some stuff and when I’m doing it I feel more in control. But three weeks away from home have made those to-do lists so daunting that even good progress feels inadequate (and I haven’t made good progress every day).

I have managed to stick to my 500-words-per-day goal (thus making my streak six days long and counting), though most days I’ve left the writing until the last thing and haven’t finished writing until midnight or later, struggling to keep my eyes open. The story so far is awfully talky (the viewpoint character is tied up, so there’s not a lot of scope for action) and I’m not certain where it’s going. Oh well, that’s what rewrite is for. Better to have a shitty first draft than nothing.

I’ve been spending more time than I really should on Facebook, mostly searching my friends’ lists of friends for people I know (I’ve managed to accumulate almost 300 friends in just a few days). I’m favorably impressed with the user interface, but the overall experience is somewhat lacking. There are lots more people I know on Facebook than LJ, but the site seems to encourage a broader, shallower interaction than LJ, with brief status updates, links, photos, and cute little applications as the currency rather than the essay-based blog culture of LJ. Facebook started out as a student thing, of course, and in many ways it reminds me of high school writ large, with crowds of users poking each other in the lunch room, scribbling on each other’s locker walls, and vying to amass the largest collection of charm bracelet charms or baseball cards. There’s a lot to do with your friends on Facebook, but it’s all very facile. I suspect I will settle into a mode like the one I have on LinkedIn, where I maintain my network but don’t participate much, and I will continue to have LJ as my primary social networking site. (Unless LJ implodes, of course, which frankly I doubt will happen.)

Oh well. With any luck I will be fully recombobulated soon.