As I peruse my Dashboard, I often find myself re-reading things I’ve written that Dashboard says someone has looked at because, um, sometimes, I’ve forgotten that I even wrote it and I guess that’s because I write so much – and have written so much since becoming a member here, there’s no way I can remember everything I’ve written. So, I’ll look at the list of things that have been recently read, peep the title, and ask myself, “What did I write?” and, uh, no – the title doesn’t always make me remember what I scribbled… so I click on the link.
Sometimes, I’ll read something and say to myself, “Wow… I wrote that?” Sometimes, I’ll look at something I wrote a while ago and it makes me frown and mutter, “You could have done a better job of writing that!” but that’s easy to say retrospectively. Every now and then, I’ll re-read something and actually groan and now the question is, “What the hell were you thinking about?” Well, duh, it’s kinda obvious what I was thinking about because I wrote it but, yeah, sure, there are times when I’ll write something, have a chance to re-read it, and then see that while it might have made sense while I was writing it, seeing it again reveals that, um, well, let’s just say that if I had to write it again, I probably wouldn’t write it at all.
One time, I went all the way back to the first post I ever wrote here and started reading… but eventually gave up on that project because, wow, it was a lot of stuff to read. I had intended to go through everything I wrote and correct any spelling errors I managed to miss but I felt that because I’m hammering at the keyboard about whatever happens to be on my mind at the time, leaving the spelling errors uncorrected – and I’m talking about the ones I managed to miss – was a truer indication of not only what was on my mind but how my mind was actually processing stuff at the time. Still, sometimes I fix a thing to preserve context and sometimes I’ll just kick myself for not seeing the error and just leave it alone.
Other than some after-the-fact proofreading, I get a kick out of re-reading the stuff I’ve already written. I don’t make a habit of it but, yeah, there are times when I’ll see part of my Dashboard and ask myself, “What was that about?” I particularly like some of the rants I’ve gone on and, after the fact, sometimes I find them hilarious even though I know that I was quite serious – and pissed off – when I wrote it.