Digital Dilemma

It's obvious that I haven't posted in a while. Why, you wonder? Well, several reasons, actually. The semester has begun, I have four preps including one new class, and I'm a little stressed. But those are not the main reasons. Actually, I'm having a digital dilemma.

Facebook. Twitter. Blogs. Text Messages. The Internet . . . . All of them were vying for my attention, and I noticed that I wasn't always really in control of how much time I spent online. I'd get on to check Facebook, and before I knew it half an hour was gone. One blog would lead to another, one website to another, and before I knew it another half hour was gone. It was as if I were giving away little bits of my life without consciously making the decision that those activities were worth the sacrifice of time. Also, something's gotta be wrong when you start evaluating every life experience in terms of whether it'll make a great tweet or a cryptic status update.

Additionally, I began to feel a low-level of stress (the kind with physical symptoms) that I believe was a result of being constantly "in touch." There were always badges telling me I had messages or that someone had posted on my wall or that someone else wanted to follow me on Twitter. Even when I didn't want to check my iphone I felt compelled to. Compelled. Isn't that a characteristic of addiction?

So, I've backed off. I leave my iphone in my purse. On the weekends I turn off alerts and avoid my laptop. At first, it was hard, and it embarasses me to say that. But now, it's much easier. I forget about being connected for hours at a time. I feel better both physically and mentally, and I get a lot more done.

I haven't decided yet how dis-connected I want to be, ultimately. I have a community of online friends that I enjoy, but I also have a life that I want to live authentically and with purpose. I'm in the process of figuring it all out. Comments and suggestions would be most welcome.

Facebook and Friendship

What are Facebook and Twitter doing to our friendships? Check out this USA Today article.

Amen, Alex

Continuing my simplifying theme, here's a great blog post from Alex.

Enjoy.

Then let me know what you think.

Facefast

Found Poem

Here's the latest tagging thing on Facebook--a Found Poem from your ipod. Here are the instructions:

1. Put your Mp3 player on shuffle
2. Write down the first line of the first 20 songs
3. Repost them in a poem
4. Play a 21st song, that is your poem title and what you title the journal.


Here's my Found Poem:

You Always Had an Eye for Things That Glitter

If it was in your mind to really cut me down
I am a pilgrim, a pilgrim of sorrow
Come on and dance.

That’s all I wanted, something special, something sacred in your eyes.
You say that somewhere over the rainbow . . .
Pardon me.

She would meet me in the morning on my way down to the river.
Has she got naughty eyes?
I am a man of constant sorrow.
I am living in danger.

I can hear your heels clicking on the sidewalk—
Oh what a dream, oh what a dream!
I fell, fell around the world.

How many of you people out there have been hurt in some kind of love affair?

I brought flowers to your door last night.
Don’t worry about me, I’ll get along
How do you solve a problem like Maria?

In the face of the unexpected, you never know what’s gonna happen tomorrow.
Long ago my heart and mind got together
When we come down we’ll be dreaming safe and sound.

Try it. And if you'd like, share the results.

Dead On

I took one of those Facebook quizzes the other day. Usually I ignore them, but this one was “What Literary Character Are You?” So, of course, I had to take it. The answer?

Hamlet.

You are introspective, skeptical, and brooding. To you the world is far too complex to be viewed in simple black and white terms. You are artistic, articulate, and intelligent, but your equivocations can sometimes lead you into trouble, which in your case can end up with everyone you know dead while some foreign prince storms your castle.

They left out an important part: everyone you know including yourself

I don’t quite think I’m Hamlet, but a few of those observations might, in some tiny way, be true. But then it hit me. The answer should have been Macbeth. That would have revealed all my inner angst over writing this dissertation. I mean, haven’t I been thinking “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . .” every day for the last few months? And haven’t I secretly believed that I would not finish my dissertation til “the last syllable of recorded time”? And deep down, aren’t I truly afraid that my dissertation will be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?

Classics--How Many Have You Read?

This is the current “tagging” thing on Facebook. Lisa did it on her blog, and since it is book related, I thought I would too.

Here goes:

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling*
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X+
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X+
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X+* (Most, but not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien*
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliott*
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X+
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky*
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles DickensX+
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen X+
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X+
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X+
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X+
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X+
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X+
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel*
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X+
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X+
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X+
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding*
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro *
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

My totals?

54 x’s
30 +’s
14 *’s

Not too bad. Certainly more than six. How about you?