It’s been a while again, huh. After long unexplained hiatuses, it’s always difficult for me to start anew. It’s partly, as I've said before, that while my habits are hard to break, they’re even harder to establish, and partly my explicable and quite reasonable fear of blank pages.

There is a third reason. Do you remember all my talk about writing substantial multiday essays? I know it made me laugh too. Well, I was multiday writing, and then I wasn’t, and then I was again, etc., and then I did that experiment with the asides, which got me thinking that my multiday essay was more fluff than content. Cue Repeat Eureka moment in which I ask myself: what if I researched my topic? what if instead of just writing about the small theories and useless facts and paranoid fantasies that swim through my little head, I include real theories and real facts and real happenings in my writings?

The problem with this Repeat Eureka moment is always my execution. Every time I think it up (in my initial euphoria I usually forget that it is a repeated moment), it sounds wonderful and I skip down the road with the best intentions until it happens: my writing clogs and not only do I do no research, I also do no writing. Each day, as I passed the PWA, I would think on how nice it might be to write. Then I would remember how I had not finished (or even started) my research yet and how I shouldn’t bother writing until I do the research, so why I don’t I just go downstairs and watch the next DVD of “Battlestar Galactica” (an excellent sci-fi series, by the way).

These are all excuses, of course. I’m not sure if I will research or finish writing the essay. What I am sure is that I will get back into this writing thing. If I weren’t so exhausted from a whirlwind trip to Paris, I’d start right now on something more substantial than this excuses post. Damn, that was a meta-meta-excuse. Sometimes I even amaze myself.