Since I am, in fact, the biggest nerd on the planet, I possess a reading journal. I made it myself years ago, back in the States. It's a 6" x 8" three-ring binder with sleeves in the covers for inserting my own pictures. On the front cover is a picture of a room with bare walls and filled waist-deep with books, surrounded by the quote "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them." It's a quote from the late great Flannery O'Connor.
Inside the book are a bouquet of bookmarks, then a great deal of notes in the binder, and then in the back cover is another photo, of an elderly nun playing paddle ball. The quote around this photo is "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?" That one's from Satchel Paige.
A reset, of sorts.
So if I didn't know a lot of things, like all the stuff I assault myself with all day long, then maybe I would be a little more free. If I didn't check Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail, would I feel a little less inadequate? Would I stop comparing my life with the lives of other people? Would I go out and find life, instead of following the plotline of everyone else's?
Not to walk away for just a day or a week.
How about walking away until next year?
Everyone that I follow on Facebook and Twitter has their life in order, with families and boatloads of friends and travel and fulfilling lifestyles. I feel empty, uninspired, lost, and (this is going to be politically incorrect, brace for it), retarded. I feel light years behind the world when I should be standing in my own shoes anyway. I have talents that I have forgotten, focus I've lost, all to my stinky self-esteem, which drags in the water like sprays of seaweed, heavy and off-balance.
How about one focus?
How about just one thing to follow?
More to come.
1 comment:
1) You're not the biggest nerd on the planet.
2) I'm beginning to understand your frustration with social media. It mostly seems like people wanting to brag about their lives. Just remember that those who brag are a self-selected bunch. There's plenty of people like me living under rocks who don't post anything at all. ;-)
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