No no no no no n on ono non ononononon onononnononoonNOONNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Why must the world work like this, in such a cruel and unfeeling manner? Numb to the pain of its victims. The injustice which I perceive here has no bounds that man could hope to comprehend. (read in epic voice)

Essentially, the problem I'm once again facing is that after putting in more long hours working on my site, with the primary goal of creating something which matches the aesthetic I want (which I am not entirely sure of at all, as you'll see) the designs and layouts that I initially was pleased with are starting to grate on my eyes a little. My site has not been public for months, and I have been heavily revising it in that time. The reason that I took it down in the first place (and the reason that it is still down as I write this) was due to the same phenomenon which I just described - it seems that once I've spent long enough staring at my own site, burning its impression into the back of my eyeballs, I am doomed to start to hate it, like a song that you once loved and after listening to it one too many times in a row you realize with tears in your eyes that it's starting to sound more and more like shit. And that realization really hurts, because you know how much joy it once brought you and now that's all over.

With my website it's arguably even more tragic, because not only did it once bring me so much joy and no longer, (by "it" I mean this specific iteration of it) but additionally I'm witnessing the death of hours of work. It's just a loss that is difficult for me to describe. When something like this happens to me, it puts me in this terrible state of limbo where I sit at my desk, staring at the now unappealing page feeling paralyzed - should I delete it all, should I just alter the CSS a little bit, maybe if I went for something more free form I would like it again...

I love making websites. I have ever since I picked up this hobby a mere 8 months ago. I'm feeling especially terrible now because the suspicion that I talked about in a previous blog post is finally being confirmed. And that scares me. It means that this hobby will never be something that I can truly settle into. I'm cursed. Woe is I. Who knows though, maybe I'll be able to overcome this. If I just learn to accept things as they are, and stop getting caught up on all these little nagging thoughts about "oh, the layout" and "this doesn't look aesthetic enough" maybe then I'll truly be able to fulfill the dream I have of creating a monolithic interactive document that I love opening up and flipping through the pages of.

I would now like to quote from one of my previous blog posts: "It might eventually start to hurt my eyes like my current one does. I guess it'll be the start of an endless cycle, which frankly, is fine." What's being referenced here is the iteration of my site that came before the current one. So that's to say that I did end up killing it, as I thought I might. The reason that then I didn't feel as bad about it as I do now is the difference in effort and "turnaround time" - what I mean by that is that the iteration referenced in the previous post was only around for a very short time - I struck a new vein of inspiration, and did away with it not as a result of it no longer appealing to me, but because something else, something shinier, came along and replaced it. And so the cementing of my pseudo-obsessive-compulsive traits was delayed, pushed off for a different, but still inevitable, time. Now may be that time. Only may, because it's likely in the coming days that the fate of my website will be decided. I may contiinue to tolerate it, even fall in love with it again, if only I can manage to get rid of the aforementioned traits. And I should add that I was wrong when I said this "is fine". It's not fine, at all. This sucks. The hell was I on about there?