Inside Dervala Hanley’s Head

Every so often, I check this site to see if I’ve written anything.
It’s mostly while working on some presentation where the client
strategy is stuck in my craw and no project manager has stopped at my
desk to perform the Heimlich Manoeuvre. I’ll huff and sigh, get coffee,
check my mail—both Outlook and pigeon hole—tweak a header style, kneel
before the kitchen altar and eat five two-bite brownies. Lapse into
severe inert reverie. Move a sentence, delete it, stare and retype it.
Eventually—all right, in minutes—I’ll alt-tab over to Firefox, and
click the vain little Dervala.net bookmark, just to see if I’ve posted.

For months now, the same entry has greeted and disappointed me. Why
hasn’t she written, this other me who shares my life but lives
upstairs? I deserve some distraction, and she affords me none. Only the
Propecia spammers add to a conversation that trailed off in November, a
Caltrain rant on the way to…where, anyway? She doesn’t even say.

If I subscribed to the feed, and if I paid attention to my subscriptions, I’d miss the delight of returning to an old haunt and discovering the treasure that has been laid in there.

Now this is funny.  I opened up Bloglines to see what cruft had accrued there, to make a point about the hopelessness of following feeds, and there is a post from Betsy scooping me on my re-discovery of content at Dervala’s.  What makes it funnier is that I snarked at Betsy just the other day in my own comments section.  Said something like "Do people really use aggregators?"  I don’t, you see.  I can’t drink from the firehose like Scoble, so it’s hopeless to stack up all these subscriptions that will just build up unviewed messages.  But it was ironic to see that Betsy got to Ms. Hanley’s place today ahead of me, and neither of us has visited there recently enough to see all the wonderful words she’s laid down this month.

Double irony:  I clicked through to Funny Ha ha and found that the post re. Derv is from a few days ago, but Bloglines tells me it was posted today.  And Bloglines doesn’t feed me Betsy’s posts that were posted since then.  In fairness, it does give me a little [!] that means there’s a feed error, but good god, who wants to learn all the ins and outs of that nonsense when Firefox will get you where you want to go?