the slow creep of progress

Monday night while I was driving around Phoenix, I called up P after not having talked to him for months and asked him if it'd be possible to bum some internet off him. He said two things: "who is this?" and "sure." We sat and caught up on random things while random huge files dribbled in from the ether. Among the topics were new site features and ways to improve and redesign everything to be damn sleek. Like geeky sleek. Hot damn. So since then, I've been drifting away from article writing again and more toward the backend development of the site. Coding for this site is always a long process for me. Not so much because the programming's hard for me, or because I'm amazingly lazy, but because I'm always bewildered by the grotesque childish-ness and hideous inelegance of the site's backend. Instead of coding the new features I've been promising for ages, I usually just spend a lot of time gaping at the sheer ugliness of everything, fighting an urge to delete it all and start over from scratch. It's like considering to buy a leather couch for an apartment with cinder-block shelves and fruit-crate end-tables. Sure, you'd like a new couch, but goddamnit, instead, you find yourself planning a long visit to the IKEA.