Considering how many blogs I read and how many of my friends have them, it’s surprising how long it took me to become a Google Reader person. I resisted, partly because when you look at your feed, you see a sort of stripped-down version of the post, sometimes not even showing the entire post and often not showing images (this is a problem with, for instance, Go Fug Yourself). But after hearing about it from a bunch of people and realizing that it would probably make my life a lot easier, I dove in and entered all my subscriptions.

I love it so much, I really do. It feeds me all my friends’ sites, so I don’t have to keep checking them. It feeds me news, and fashion, and things that are funny, and it updates me instantly about all manner of pop-culture detritus. And it keeps me from forgetting to look at little sites that I’ll neglect to bookmark and not check for weeks.

But now, it feeds me, like, a thousand posts a day. I realize this seems impossible, but if you consider that the Gawker Media sites alone — not all of which I read exhaustively, but most of which I read sometimes, not just the gossip sites, but Jezebel and Consumerist and Idolator — sometimes post thirty or fifty times in a day, you can see how it gets there. Gothamist, Apartment Therapy, the New York Magazine blogs…all of a sudden, I have to figure out how to eliminate things, because there’s just no way.

I knock off Defamer and Gawker, which post so much that it’s basically hopeless to keep up, just marking them as if I’ve read them, unless there’s something in particular I want to read. And if it happens to be a day when Engadget and Gizmodo get their hands on fifty digital cameras each, I have to ignore those, too, because: no way. Oh, and Curbed/Racked/Eater, I cheat on sometimes, too.

Am I the only person who has this problem? How do you manage your subscriptions so you don’t wind up with that dreaded “(1000+)” indicator all the time? Every time I clear things off without reading them, I worry that I’m missing something brilliant. Like the ONE POST that was going to change my life is in there somewhere, and I missed it. It’s like finishing a book by skipping every other page until you get to the end. How do you know what was on that page? Maybe that was the best part!

I think I have GoogleReaderitis.