I recently added a support page to my main web page, where people can offer some sort of financial contribution. (That reminds me, I need to think of a better way to describe it than “my main web page.”)

I have to admit, I was very reluctant to do that. I already have Google ads on my blogs, and I often link to specific books on Amazon, but after two years, I have yet to hit the earnings thresholds ($100 and $10, respectively) on either of those.

What really bugs me is that after all this time, I just don’t have as much content available here as I would like. Partly this is because my time is limited, but mostly this is because I’m so darned picky about things. I take a long time to figure out how I want things to be organized, and how I want them to look, and sometimes after I decide those things, I start working and realize that how I’ve organized or designed things isn’t going to work out so great. So I start tweaking it, and either end up making three hundred tweaks, or going back to the drawing board.

In some ways, this is just a function of working on computers, because it is so easy to change things. I had an issue on my bookblog relating to the appearance a few months ago of the text in the header. It was just a minor thing really, but it bugged me. Looking back, there were four ways I could have dealt with it:

1. Learn to live with it. It’s not the way I want it to look, but oh, well.
2. Delude myself into thinking that’s how I actually want it to look.
3. Create a new header image which included the text. (Easy to do with Photoshop, but it meant that if I ever decided to change the header text, which I plan to, I have to go back to Photoshop, redesign the header image, and upload it to the blog.)
4. Figure out how to actually fix the CSS code.

Thinking about it now, I realize that the fourth option was the only one that was really available to me. I could have used option #3, which would have taken me all of ten minutes, but that wasn’t the “right” way to fix an issue with CSS. I just wasn’t ready to punt on the issue. I eventually figured out what I was doing wrong—it was less of an issue with me and more an issue with a recent update to the theme—and got a proper fix for it, but doing so actually took over two hours.

Part of this has to do with OCD. I can literally spend hours organizing things in realspace, without ever getting anything done on them. I always have this fantasy in my mind where I actually have all the space that I need to properly organize everything, and then I’ll be able to get everything done that I want to. I can actually see how everything looks, too, in its nice little stack and spread out across shelves and tables.

Of course, even if that happens, I’ll still have a hard time getting things done because I swear my brain mutates into a small, highly distracted squirrel who survives on coffee and glazed doughnuts. First I’ll think about this, and a few minutes (seconds? hours? Time sort of becomes meaningless.) later I’ll start thinking about that, and then after a bit more time has passed, I’ll start thinking about something else entirely. I have friends who call this ADD, but I don’t think so. ADD is an all-the-time sort of thing. This squirrel-brain-state comes and goes. When it’s gone, I’m incredibly productive. When it comes, I get a little bit done on each of three million things, which means that each one of them moves forward maybe a millimeter or so.

This is going to change, though. The squirrel-brain-state comes about mainly when I’m worried about things, and I’m worried about things a lot less lately. Maybe I’m just in denial, but since Lent began, I’ve had the strongest feeling like something good is going to happen before too long. Maybe not tomorrow, and maybe not next week, but sometime soon. As far as the OCD thing goes, I’ve found the best thing is to just get out what I want to work on right here, right now, and block everything else out of my mind. Then I can organize this little bit that I’m working on well enough that I can actually get something done on it.

So for now, I don’t really care if nothing comes through the transom of the support page because there isn’t all that much to support. There will be, in time. And after that, I still won’t be bothered if nothing comes through, because something good is going to happen. I know it is.

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