Confessions and Frustrations

1. You all know Sundry's awesome new site, Bodies in Motivation? Well, now I have a blog over there, too! It's called Not a Diet and the first post is up! So go check it out and leave a comment and add it to your reader. I am very excited about the site as a whole and especially about being a regular contributor.

2. I am a planner. I want so many things that I feel like I'm pushing my luck. And also, I'm becoming very domestic. I want a dog and a house and a baby. But I also want a career and have a lot of plans and thoughts about where I'm going to go from here and how our lives can accommodate two careers and two kids without killing us. I think it's feasible. But I want it to start happening now.

I'm working on living in the moment. I do want to spend the next year or so just being married and enjoying being together. And I DO enjoy that, and I AM happy the way things are. But I'm also sick of people making fun of me for having plans and dreams and thinking about stuff that isn't going to happen yet. I KNOW I'm not going to have a baby right now, and I KNOW we're not ready to buy a house yet. I am aware of those things and fully satisfied with our choice to wait on that stuff. That doesn't mean that I don't enjoy thinking about and planning that stuff, and yes, sometimes looking at real estate listings or adorable baby clothes online. I can't be alone in this. Can I?

3. Writing about Senegal, putting it all down in one place, has made me realize that there are a lot of things that I haven't told anybody. Not that I've exactly kept it all to myself, but that there are all these bits and pieces of things and I'm the only one who has the whole picture, and a lot of things inform other things so without the full picture there's really a lot of crucial information missing. It's good to get it all down in one place. It's also kind of nice to know that this is an experience that exists only with me as one whole thing, and that parts of it are stored with various other people as well. I have to figure out what, if any, of what I'm writing can be shared coherently here on the blog. I think a lot of it is valuable in one way or another. But maybe only to me? I don't know.

4. The New York Times seems to think that their newspaper is priceless. Or really, the opposite of priceless, because if you want to subscribe and you don't live in New York, you're looking at paying $700 a year. Compare that to the Washington Post, which costs about $150 a year. But the thing that pisses me off the most is that the NYT is so confusing. When we subscribed, it listed a price and then said that you got a promotional 50% discount for the first 12 weeks. So I assumed that the discount was half off the listed price. But after subscribing, I discovered that the listed price WAS half off. So it costs twice as much as I thought. When the promotion runs out, I'll be calling to cancel unless they're willing to extend the discount. The NYT is better than the Post, but more than four times better? I think not.

Also, their subscriber website sucks. It said I was enrolled in automatic payments, but then yesterday we didn't get a paper and when I went on the website it looked like my bill might be due, but it was impossible to tell, so I tried to check in my emails but all the emails I have from them just say that they're confirming a change to my account without saying WHAT THE CHANGE IS, so I have no idea what's happened. I set up the automatic payments again, I think, but then things looked different so I have no idea if I was already enrolled in them or not. AND, when I reported that we didn't get a paper it said it would credit my account. Would it have said that if the reason we didn't get the paper is that we hadn't paid our bill? And if that was the case, wouldn't they have sent some sort of email? Or would the stupid email just have said that there's been a change in our account? ARGH.

All I'm saying is, this is the most popular newspaper in the country, and they charge solid gold nuggets to deliver it, so you'd think they could invest a few of their pennies in an online subscriber system that doesn't seem like it was developed while I was in the crib. Just a thought.

5. I'm having trouble keeping up with the blogs of my more recent readers. I love the comments everyone leaves, and I love the amazing community we have, but I've been so crazy with the wedding and work and all that I haven't been as good about clicking through to your blogs, and now I can't tell which of you I've added to my reader and which I haven't, in part because a lot of you have the same name. But I finally got my reader down to zero yesterday, WITHOUT marking all is read, and I even managed to leave a lot of comments in the process. Which means, I think I'm ready to start catching up on readers. So would you please do me a favor? If you read my blog regularly but as far as you can tell, I don't read your blog regularly, please say so in the comments, and I will try to make sure that I have everyone on my Google Reader so that I can stop by, at least occasionally.