Wow. I need to let my eyes adjust for a minute. I get headaches from staring at a computer screen for too long. Yet somehow, an hour has passed me by while I have been glued to my screen. I have been on houzz.com. Between Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail and now this new site, I hardly have time to write. It used to be that I would only have to check my email on my computer. And since I am not that important beyond my inner group of friends, that task would only take up a meager five minutes. Now, before I can do anything else, I become trapped in a web of reading what my ‘friends’ are up to, seeing what awesome new quote or recipe has been added to my online bulletin board, checking out the latest tweets and now viewing thousands of images of beautiful rooms, none of which are likely to come to fruition in my home.
I can’t even explain how this happened to me. There are parts of me that really resist technology…hence my four year old pink flip phone. It’s a conversation piece at this point. I don’t want to always be connected to people. Well, I like to be connected, but on my terms. I love to get emails from people but I am terrible at responding back. It is an acknowledged flaw of mine. But, like a junkie, I can barely walk by my computer without sneaking a peak on one of the above mentioned sites.
I thought I knew better than this. I thought I knew better than to waste away the precious and rare moments in my life when I actually have time to do something for myself. I am always telling my students to stop wasting their time texting each other all hours of the day. Is this really any better?
Then I remember the time that I found out on facebook that my university friend’s father had passed away and how I was able to send her out a message instantly. And I remember when so many sent me messages about my father on the 10th anniversary of his death and how comforted I felt. And I think of how inspiring some of the things I have seen on Pinterest are. I think also of my eighteen followers on Twitter and how inspiring my tweets about what bakery I have been to today must be to them. Ok. So not all of the things I am doing online are life affirming or life changing, sometimes they just feel good.
Obviously, this must be how I want to be spending my free time or I would be doing something else, right? It’s just that sometimes I feel more like I have to do it. It is the feeling that I am going to miss out on something crazy good if I don’t check in. For instance, that my friend is about to start watching Breaking Dawn: Part One. I am not sure that my life would be any worse off without knowing what everyone is thinking about or coveting but there is something so appealing about it.
Yes, I have gotten into a bad habit with this computer of mine. Actually getting down to work has become a complicated routine of first checking out at least five websites before opening any kind of blank page for writing. And as I have already mentioned, this routine can be quite time consuming. Maybe this online craze will pass and I will get some of my precious time back. But, I don’t think so. This is probably just the tip of the ice burg and we really haven’t seen anything yet. If this is the case, things for me will need to change. I don’t want to experience my life online in single line posts to friends or through a thousand shared images on a bulletin board that I may never look at again.
What I want is a life filled with actually visiting with my friends and family. I want to leaf through magazines while I sit under a blanket on my couch with a tea in my hand. And instead of ‘pinning’ beautiful pictures of the seasons, I want to be outside enjoying them. Real life is too short and too beautiful to get ‘lost’ in an online world. And I am going to get to living that life as soon as I check my facebook account just one more time before I go to bed.
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