Save tonight

‘I will go down with this ship’  Dido – White Flag
Do you ever feel like life is swirling around you and that if you weren’t careful you’d drown in it? Or is it just me? A week back at work and I feel stuck in a routine again, like if I wasn’t careful I would wake up and autumn and early winter would have passed me by and it would be christmas already. I’m really struggling to separate the days at the moment and I feel hopelessly stuck in limbo. Maybe it’s the time of year. For the first time in years, september has almost passed me by unnoticed. There have been none of those longings of a new start, a fresh start, like I used to have when I was at school/college/uni. Maybe cos I feel that this is it now, there is no fresh start. Well, you can have fresh starts, but do they ever really change you? I mean really? New clothes, new hair do, new job/house, etc are all very well, but have you changed inside? I don’t think so.

But enough with the depressingness of the entry, what has happened here? This is a fresh start if ever I saw one. I haven’t played on OD for a long time, but I will this weekend, see if there is anything great about version 4. Not impressed with the subscription reduction though, a warning would have been nice so I could have hung on two weeks and paid the $24 for a full year. But $20 only worked out at £13 for six months I can’t complain. Unlike loads of other people here. There are some unhappy people cos of the site merger, but I can’t see the point in getting worked up about it. It benefits me, I now have no excuse not to read those who never moved over here. (I have a fair bit of catching up to do this weekend!) I don’t care about the extra benefits of paying – I don’t think I ever used the blocking facility and I never cared about lack of ads, we have a pop-up blocker anyway. I suppose the only thing that concerns me is a return to the reasons people left fod in the first place. I hope I don’t spend weekends unable to log on because the servers can’t cope with the extraordinary amount of people. I’m staying and I’ll continue to pay the money because I appreciate this place so much and even at the original price, just over a couple of quid a month doesn’t break our bank, it just stops me buying crap I don’t really need. I don’t think there’s much to do other than sit and see what happens. Some of the entries I read yesterday took me back to when od plus started and the fod bashing that went on. A return to those days seems inevitable in the short term, which is sad really, laying into those that maybe can’t afford it (the exchange rate ain’t so good everywhere in the world you know). I reserve judgement. But, in my head at least, it backs up what I said above. Fresh starts don’t really change much. At the end of the day, people loved this site when they didn’t pay, when they didn’t have the extra benefits and coped with the crappy servers. You know why? Because it was the one place I could come and be myself. That hasn’t changed, no matter whether there are ads or not and whether there are 300,000 or 300 diaries on the site.

Until there is a next time…

xx