Drunken Owls and Other Delights

[Picture borrowed from timkla.wordpress.com.]

Yes, yes...I know I'm two days behind now. I wholly blame myself for that. Time to catch up.

On that note, I'd originally thought of talking about distraction and how it impedes my writing work. I thought about what exactly distracted me, especially lately. Is it my ever-constant fiddling with my music collection? Is it my occasional FreeCell games? But the more I thought about it, I realized there's really only one true distraction for me: the internet.

It's weird, really. I never thought I'd get sucked in this far, and now I'm daily trying to force myself off the damn thing, especially when I really need to be writing. It wasn't like this in the past.

But let's be honest--when my family first went online in the late 90s, it was through AOL and other webservices, and we were using dial-up and the speed was slow as hell. And even into the 2000s when we finally got broadband and all the PCs in the house were connected, I didn't get distracted. Maybe it was that there were far fewer social networks out there as there are now, or at least none that I cared to join. Besides, I had a trilogy I had to write, and I holed myself up downstairs in the basement on a nightly basis. And even then, I was more focused on the writing than I was going online and looking up pointless things. I did occasionally go online in the Belfry, but usually to look up information for my writing.

That seems to be the rub, right there: Social networking.

I never used to be this bad. Back in the 90s, we had the bbs--the bulletin board site, which was set up sort of like today's Reddit tree, but without the inserted sub-items. Very linear and lifeless, and catered pretty much to specific groups and subjects. Then there was the webforum, which you still see (usually on tech sites like C/Net and the like), but are rarely used as a social spot anymore.

If I'm not mistaken, LiveJournal popped up sometime around 2002 or so, and I joined a few years later in 2004. I have a permanent account which pretty much paid itself off quite a few years ago. This is probably where I first enjoyed a social network, as I was able to connect with a lot of my friends who were not nearby, and I was also able to meet new people as well. It is sad that it seems to be dying a slow death, at least here in the US, as I've depended on it for a number of years, especially when I moved out here to SF.

I don't even remember exactly what caused the first major exodus from LJ--I think it was some Terms of Service ballyhoo--and at the time I felt it really petty that a number of people were jumping ship so quickly. At the same time, however, I noticed that a lot of these same people were also leaving or at least backing away because they'd run out of things to say on their blogs. I guess the diary aspect of blogging about your day wore thin after awhile. I remember a lot of people leaving or abandoning LJ because they just didn't have anything to say.

On the same token, however, I noticed that many of these same people were heading over to Facebook, and Twitter shortly after. Maybe it wasn't that they didn't have anything to say...more like they wanted to say something more immediate. Something off the top of their head, rather than a longer blog post. There was also more interactivity--instead of posting an entry and waiting for someone to answer, you were instead talking pseudo-realtime through short back-and-forth entries.

What's interesting about all of this is that, in the ever-changing move from one network to another, a user who wants to keep in touch really does need to have the ability to juggle multiple platforms. I came to this realization about this time last year, when I'd noticed I had all these different sites: three different sort-of-active LJs, a few inactive LJs, a Dreamwidth account, Facebook, Twitter, and a WordPress site. It was too much! I needed to pare down, and quick. I got rid of the inactive LJs, stopped using the Dreamwidth account (which I still have but don't use at present), and my remaining blogs have become subject-specific. This leaves Facebook and Twitter as the purely social sites for me.

I've soured on Facebook for various reasons--not so much because of the people on it, or the things that get posted, or the constant site changes, but the general vibe. It just feels...it's hard to describe, but it just feels very shallow, like there's not much emotion to it. Just a lot of reactive emotion but not much creativity. Which pretty much keeps me on Twitter. Twitter's like a nonstop silly game of Exquisite Corpse, where users riff off each other, comment on each other's witticisms, and generally have a lot of fun. I think that's the best part of being relegated to 140 characters--you have to think about what you're about to type, to whom, and how. I also love the fact that the hashtag is totally used for the wrong reasons--it's supposed to be a tag, but it's quite often used as sarcasm or a silly aside. And it refreshes at an alarming rate. It's addictive.

And this, my friends, is why I need to relearn how to avoid distraction!

Okay, I'm a day late in getting this started, I'll do two at some point so I can catch up. As I've mentioned in the past, I've never been able to slog through NaNoWriMo for one reason or another (mostly because life gets in the way), so I've pretty much given up on trying at this point. I still wanted to give myself a month-long writing goal, however, so I've decided to try my hand at a daily post of things that are important to me, or are things that are often on my mind. They might be ephemeral, slight, personal, silly, subjective, illogical, or just in fun--a sort of expansion on the #30DaysofThanks meme I've been seeing on Twitter. Hope you enjoy.





Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France

I rarely if ever mention religion online. It's not something I usually bring up for various and obvious reasons--more often than not, someone else has already brought it up in the context of politics, pedophilia, or what have you. Those aren't conversations I feel comfortable having, especially online. I don't ignore these issues, I just don't want to talk about them because I really don't have any power to do anything about it except have my voice get lost in the din.

That said...that's not what I want to talk about here.

If anything, for at least a decade or so, I've often said that I consider myself more spiritual than religious. I was brought up Roman Catholic, went through all the usual rituals one takes in youth--baptism, communion, confirmation, and so on--but by the time I was a junior in high school, I'd decided I didn't want to go to church anymore. It wasn't that I didn't believe anymore, or that I'd become disillusioned...it was that mentally, I felt that the same old Sunday ritual had run its course for me and I was just going through the motions at that point. I remember in college when Rev. Coffee stated that most young adults leave the church about 18 or so, but end up returning to it about a decade later. It was an interesting thing to say, and I wasn't sure if that would happen to me, but it at least made me think.

Fast-forward to 1995, when my then girlfriend Diana and I had been invited to a Wiccan circle ritual (sorry, I seem to have forgotten the exact term for it at the moment). I figured, why not? I'd decided to have an open mind about it, let myself get lost in the ritual and see what happens. The ritual itself was to stand together in a circle--which is an extremely strong and protective symbol in Wicca--and to center oneself with the spiritual energy surrounding us. Logically, it made sense to me: it wasn't so much about the "magick" of wielding spiritual energy like in fantasy books and movies, as it was about centering one's self, and witnessing the inner and outer peace of the self and those around me. Sort of like yoga or tai chi, but without the physical movement--this was all mental and emotional. It was a wonderfully calming and moving ritual, and I left utterly fascinated and wanting to study more.

From around 1996 to about 1998, I looked into all sorts of spiritual and New Agey things, reading a lot of books and trying things out. I of course followed these things with one foot firmly planted in reality--I knew that automatic writing was really more of a stream-of-consciousness exercise in letting my brain write stuff down without the Internal Editor jumping in to stop me, for instance--but to be honest, it did help me deal with a lot of deeply personal things that had gone on over the past five years. It felt great to be able to center myself mentally and emotionally.

As mentioned before, this foray into New Age also helped influence the Eden Cycle trilogy. I took what I had gathered: a reverence to a higher power, the strength of ritual, the outcome of blind faith, and focusing on a spiritual anchor--and with a little anime influence to give it an SF spin, I had the core of the novels. By 1999 or so, I'd channeled these spiritual things into my writing, to the point where writing was the ritual itself, and the beliefs were in the words I was writing.

By 2004, when I'd temporarily put the trilogy aside and started writing Love Like Blood, real life definitely got the best of me, especially for the next few years. After being pretty much a solitary person for over a decade, starting a relationship, moving out of the house, getting married, and moving across the country definitely trumped any spiritual thoughts I'd had. I never completely dismissed spiritual thoughts, I just didn't have time for them then.

It wasn't until recently that I've returned to spiritual thoughts. I think this is partly due to the negative publicity religion is getting as of late. Some of it justified, of course, but a lot of it also unjustified due to the internet's habit of crass generalization and kneejerk emotional reaction. Again, that's not what I'm going into here.

Personally I can't say whether there is a God or Allah or whatever deity might be out there, and I have no problem with others having faith in said deity. In fact, I quite enjoy witnessing the faithful, especially when I know they're getting it and not just going through the motions or following blindly. I understand the ritual of Sunday mass or a prayer session, and so on. Personally, I do feel there is a interconnectedness out there--perhaps it's my view of "reality" in a spiritual focus.



When we were at the Notre Dame Cathedral last week during our Paris vacation, I was struck by how strong the spiritual vibe was, to the point that I just could not bring myself to take any pictures within the walls--it just felt wrong and intrusive to do so. In a way it was like I could feel the spiritual energy of over eight hundred fifty years within those walls (construction of the original church started in 1160), sensing centuries of faith and devotion, in this one sacred place. I didn't think of photography as desecration, but more like I would be dismissing what I was sensing. I just couldn't deny myself that. I instead chose to embrace this connection, this sensation of deep and powerful belief.

It then occurred to me--this is what spirituality is truly about for me. It's about finding an anchor to tie your soul down in one place, to keep it grounded so it isn't flying every which way. It's about mental and emotional focus. This is why Ephesians 4:14 is one of my favorite quotes in the Bible: so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. I read that not as a comment on following the One True Faith, but as a comment on not being passive and letting everything influence me.

If anything, my spirituality is not in the belief of a higher deity, but more of a focus on where I stand in regards to the universe around me, how it influences me and how I can influence it, and how to keep myself tethered in the process.


[Note: the Bible quote is the English Standard Version; like any other quote, the wording varies from version to version, but it's essentially the same.]