hmpf

I like to put all this out in the open because I know that silence in LJ - silence in response to an entry, extended silence from a friend who used to be commenting etc. - can be problematic and is likely to be interpreted in unfortunate ways, and the same goes for filtering, selective catching up, etc. I think for all but the most self-assured of us there's always an element of "does she still like me?" involved when we suspect - often wrongly - we're being ignored - and I'm currently ignoring a hell of a lot of people. So, here's what's happening with me and LJ, i.e. with me and you:

I have decided I will catch up with everyone among you that I know a bit. If I've had more than a couple of short conversations with you, and had you friended before May 2007, I will catch up with you - fully catch up, or at least as fully as I can. If you're crazy prolific I may have to settle for six months or so back.

Catching up as completely as that will take months, but that's okay. I want to know what's been going on with you.

Once I've caught up with a journal, I will move that journal to my 'up to date' reading filter, which means I will start reading it in real time again. There are currently less than ten journals in that filter.

This means that for the time being, I will continue to 'ignore' many of your journals. This is not a sign that I'm not interested; it merely means that I'm overwhelmed, and very busy with uni, and I need to take this step by step. The time needed for catching up with the backlog has to come from somewhere, so I'm going to take it out of the time I'd be spending reading my daily friends page. This is why the friends page needs to stay short, for now, and grow only very slowly.

The order in which I will be catching up with you is fairly random. Yes, I caught up with some of the people I'm closest to first - but beyond that very closest circle of my friends (and that is very small indeed, on LJ) your position on the catching up list doesn't really say much. It's partly alphabetical, partly volume-based (I tend to catch up with a few short journals, then a longer one, then a few short again etc.) Occasionally I'll abandon the more or less alphabetical pattern and catch up with someone further on in the alphabet for whatever reason. E.g.

tgifa tagged me with a meme and told me so in a comment here, so I decided to catch up with her on the spot (her journal was relatively short, too, so that made it easy).

Now, for people I only friended during my last really active LJ phase, back in spring/early summer this year - I won't catch up with most of you (the exception being people I've had closer dealings with, like

space_oddity_75), and I won't put you on the 'up to date' reading filter for now. This doesn't mean I'm not interested but simply that, while I'm still unable to even pay the people I already do know a bit the attention they deserve, I can't really start interactions with new people. I'll put you back on the daily reading filter when I'm further along in the catching up process, and we can pretend we just friended each other then, perhaps, and finally get to know each other. ;-) You're welcome to ignore me until then, too, of course. (And after that, too, really - I can't really expect people to accept my willfully ignoring them for months yet expect them to go on reading my blatherings. Chances are you aren't even reading this, come to think of it. *g*)

Okay. I hope everybody knows where they stand with me now.

ETA: From all of this kind of follows: if there's anything going on in your life or your LJ that you really want me to know about, it's probably best if you drop me a note, here or via e-mail (my e-mail addy is on my user info page), as long as I'm still on my 'selective reading' diet.

Thanks.