It was a bit cathartic when I signed out of my social networking sites just before midnight on Saturday. I was with my wife and four of our best friends Dermot, Laura, Lee, and Sarah. I didn’t make a huge deal of it and there was no real ritual to it but there was still a sense of relief. We talked and sipped cocktails until the wee hours and had a rather grand time, as we always do at the Connor’s house. The next morning however I discovered what a habit Facebook had become when I awoke and grabbed my phone, ready to check in on my friends. This motion was repeated at various intervals during the day but since I had removed the icons from my home screen I was instantly reminded of my decision. I want to say that this was habit and not addiction as I never felt like something was missing or I needed to get on Facebook, or any other social networking site for that matter, this was simple habit. Once I remembered what was going on I didn’t care that I wasn’t getting on. I really didn’t feel like I was missing anything. This morning when I woke I merely went to Google News to see if there was anything interesting. I don’t think this will really be all that hard. As you can see the title of this post is quite apropos as none of what I have type really means all that much but as part of my hiatus from social networking I have promised myself I will write more here in my own little corner of the web.
In order to find the time to parse thoughts in to a coherent set of words, sentences, and even paragraphs I am trying to use my bud ride in to work to write more. The WordPress app for Android allows one to compose local drafts so I don’t even have to use my phone as a hotspot if I am not commenting on things that need to be linked. This allows me to write a draft and look it over in a couple of hours after I have finished it and before posting. Not that I am good at proofreading my own work, quite the contrary in fact, but it gives me a chance to make sure I am at least keeping my thoughts in some sort of order. Incoherent or less than cohesive rambling is something that I worry about since I am, in essence, forcing myself to write instead of only writing when I have considered a topic at length and want to bang on the keyboard and produce a piece on a singular topic. Now that’s not saying I couldn’t be incoherent on a single topic but I feel the chances of that are lower than when I am writing because it’s time to write.
And now comes my least favorite part of public transportation. I am now crowded in to my seat by a rather large woman who has apparently bathed in perfume and has no respect for boundaries such as the end of her seat and the beginning of mine or even the beginning of my body! Luckily this is not often an issue and if it was I would likely cease using the bus to get to work because as much as I am a physical person when it comes to my friends I also don’t like having another human being pressed against me for 30 to 45 minutes while the waves of perfume wafting off of them slowly give me a throbbing headache. The thing is that I am not a small person but I do fit in the seat on the bus. This time I wasn’t the last open seat nor was I near the front of the bus so it is inexplicable why I am now pressed against the window and can barely type. The lack of consideration for others is something you can see every day when you take public transportation. Some days it completely amazes me. I would guess that some of this stems from our society becoming too casual but at this moment I won’t be going in to that; rather, I will be closing up my device and trying to defy physics and make my mass fit in to less area that it does at current. It is too cramped to continue writing at this point so I will just be done.
Comments
David Peterson Harvey on 07.02.2012
Of course, by posting to your blog, you’ve just made the communication on way, not eliminated it.
Romeo Sid Vicious on 07.02.2012
It’s actually two way. Comments are imported from FB to here. It’s not the communication I am trying to get away from it’s the snippets, the lack of completeness, the sound bit length attention span. It’s not even just the people on my friend’s list but myself as well. I guess I could give an alternate description of want to try and get some completeness back in to my life instead of living in snippets.