Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Analog

Just when the mosquitos have finally had their fill for the night, the baby wakes me up. I've had perhaps an hour of sleep and an hour of sleep-dancing with mosquitos. But when I pat her bum and lull her back to sleep, I'm as fresh as the moon. 

I climb back in to bed with my phone and check the internet. Oh, the internet. How much I hate thee. There are minute tweets reminding me of all the things wrong in this world that needs to be righted by my 140-character opinion. There are articles on flipboard specifically in the lifestyle category specifically in the fashion and home and cooking category that keep me besotted, wasting away in a virtual puddle of my own urine, imagining all the clothes and chairs and cheeses I have yet to try.  There is instagram's daily reminder that other people's lives are perfect and busy and pretty and edgy and consistently filtered, the latter showing a flair for principled artsiness that is lacking in my own, baby-filled of late, account.  The internet tells me not what I need to know but what I've missed out on knowing. 

Of course there is no shortage of interestingness in my life but to what aim? If reduced to a tweet or a square frame, it becomes as interesting as the next person who feels self-interesting.  Although I don't feel self-interesting, which is a lie, the sheer drive of competition pushes me over the edge and I become the worst type of person: the better-than-yours type. 

It is fodder, it is foul, and it is completely, utterly, unavoidable, because even if I convinced myself I am sharing my life for purely innocent reasons how can I really trust that my arguments have no ulterior motive?  There is a space in my head that could be filled with all manners of things and so it goes and fills itself with all manners of things on some kind of autopilot.  As if to say that if it had always had this option from the start, it would have sought out the easy graphic flippable things that may be interesting for the faceless public instead of the messy scribbles, classic lit tomes and hardbopping jazz tunes of my childhood that truly twang my heartstrings. 

I will come at it again tomorrow because I must prove that I am different from the rest of the world through the same social media behaviors everyone in the rest of the world are using; daily and forever imprinting that fact through my trail of interesting internet activities.  The digital thirst overwhelms my better sense of analog being. 

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