Drunken Owls and Other Delights

 As always, the start of a new month is always the start-over of the usual daily whiteboard schedule. I no longer see being unable to follow it to the letter as failure, of course...I accept there were reasons for not getting any writing work done, or whatever it was that didn't get completed. Life gets in the way now and again. The whiteboard isn't a strict errand board but a useful way of keeping my brain in working order.

I have to say I'm quite impressed that I somehow managed (sort of) to get 391 writing days in a row on 750Words, but the other day I just said nah, enough is enough and I don't need to do that anymore. To be honest I'd started running out of new things to write there early on, and instead writing a sort of Walk in Silence (the book) overview of the music I enjoyed over the years. It was fun while it lasted but by the time I reached 385 days it had become a time-consuming chore. I'll use the site again, of course. It's extremely useful for writing very rough drafts of novels! But yeah, I'm taking a hiatus on that for a bit now.

Speaking of hiatuses, the one I'd started for my blogs is now over. I want to return back to Welcome to Bridgetown and Walk in Silence (the blog) again, because it's always been fun. Do I have stuff to blather about? Who knows? I can usually come up with something, so no worries there. I'm going to try twice a week for both once again, but I'll still allow a day off if I'm just too busy or distracted.

And speaking of distracted, I think I'm up there with @anagramofbrat in that I'm feeling VERY distracted by social media again. Not so much doomscrolling as just getting that dopamine fix, mainly on Threads. I'd like to be more connected on them and not reactive, though. The difference of course being that I miss having that fun connection with other people because I've been too willingly drawn in by someone's drama thread. [And I'm ACTIVELY avoiding political posts these days, so no worries there.] How to handle that, change that? Well, I'm not sure, but I'll figure it out.

New month, new schedule, new days. We'll see where this leads.

Today's our last day of vacation, and I'm already looking forward to getting back into the swing of things come tomorrow. As much as I've enjoyed the mental and physical slowdown to recharge my batteries, I'm more than ready to get moving again. These days off helped me rethink the way I approach my Current Day Job day. Aside from the stressful moments -- which to be honest aren't even close to unhealthy as the bank job's were -- I truly enjoy being there. As I've said in the past, my one concern as of late was wasting so much time on social media during my breaks, and wanting to break that habit once and for all.

There are different ways I can approach it, and one I'm planning to do is the one I used to get myself to quit smoking ages ago: 'let's see how long I can go without doing [x]'. Something as simple as reverse psychology works for me on occasion, so why not try it here? Let's see how long I can go without screwing around on my phone. Let's step outside for a few minutes. Let's bring in one of my Publisher's Weeklys that I'm desperately falling behind on and read that instead. Whatever works.

I'm also happy that this week's upcoming schedule is one I can handle easily. Opening tomorrow, followed by two midshifts (tiring but not exactly stressful if I play them right), followed by a day off, and ending the week with two bookkeeper-opens. I do like a steady schedule instead of a wonky one, so I'm hoping that this one becomes the norm, or at least close to it. [Now, I'm expecting the coworker who broke his foot to be returning sometime this month which may relieve me of one of the midshifts, but we'll see.] 

In the meantime, it's Sunday which means it's also laundry day and PC cleaning day, so that's pretty much the only other things I need to do.





Hope everyone has a good week ahead!

 Some of my friends and I have been talking about the state of Twitter lately, and yeah, it's pretty bad these days. I'm trying to think of a similar situation and I've come up with a few:

--It feels like that temp job you had where you know that the department you're working in is on its way towards close-down, and you've been hired to basically do the last rounds of assignments while various cubicles are being torn down around you.
--It feels like the last semester of senior year in high school when all those social stigmas and irritations just...don't really matter all that much anymore.
--It feels like your two relatives who you love dearly but all they ever do when they get together is complain about the idiocy someone caused or how the quality of things has declined. And how it's not really their fault.
--It feels like you've just landed in someone's basement that stinks of stale Cheetos and hundreds of cans of Monster Energy.

The first one especially for me. The site has either chased off or disgusted a large number of users for a multitude of reasons, and it's a shell of what it used to be. I would not be surprised if there was a considerable number difference between active non-bot users in, say, 2013 and this past month. It doesn't help that its current CEO has treated it so badly you'd think he's dissecting and disassembling it piece by piece on purpose.

Mind you, I still connect with a number of people, creators and friends on there because like me, they haven't quite given up on it yet. I've given up (or at least muted) those who spend their online time QTing or RTing bigots -- I know they're there and I'd rather not be reminded so often, thank you -- but for the most part I'll still follow you if you're still there.

I'm mostly following the blogs these days, to be honest, but if I'm looking for that instant dopamine rush of chat-centric social media, then I bounce between Twitter and Facebook. I've tried Mastodon and it's a bit past my level of brainspace I'm willing to give (not that I don't understand it, it's just too fiddly for the amount of patience I'm willing to give it). I'm on Discord because my east coast friends have created a great server where we can all meet on the daily. But that's about it.

I'm sure I'll probably quit Twitter at some point, and I think it'll probably be in the same fashion I left LiveJournal: when no one I know is there anymore and it ceases to be useful, then I'll log off for the last time.

It seems every couple of years I have this nagging urge to shake up my usual schedule of personal habits and endeavors.  It's almost like clockwork, actually.  I'll start feeling complacent, start getting bored with hitting the same points over and over, and need a change of scenery.  The turnaround seems to be about two years, three at the most.

So what does this mean?  This means that I've been thinking about my internet habits again.  Sure, I've had multiple sessions of unplugging for mental health reasons, as well as hiding away so I can finish off a major project, but they've always been for a finite amount of time.  Once I'm rested and/or all caught up, I'm right back into the thick of it.

Yeah, I've been bringing up that point of 'remember back in 2002 when I was rarely online' and wanting to return to that, but never quite acting on it.  It's still on my mind, but really, over the last few months I've been thinking about why I haven't acted on it.  Part of it is the worry that no internet footprint = no visibility = no book sales.  Part of it is just laziness and procrastination and distraction, that I can't be bothered to become a 21st century Luddite.

I've been making a few changes in those habits lately, though.  How many years have I had Twitter open in a browser tab, next to my email box tab?  Far too long.  I've never been one to keep all kinds of browsers open anyway, just as I like to keep my PC desktop as clean and orderly as possible.  [I have a few coworkers who have upwards to thirty or forty shortcuts pasted all over their screen.  Just the idea of that makes me twitch!]  But it's become all too obvioius that I'm distracting myself a lot more often than I have.

I know this for a fact because, as an experiment over the last month or so, I've been shutting down Twitter and sometimes even the email, leaving only the radio station I happen to be listening to.  [Or if I'm listening to my mp3s, closing down the browser entirely.]  So every time I've had the temptation to go online and read something, I'd have to open up a tab and go to the site.  And lo and behold, I was opening it up way too often.  Even during my writing time, I was doing it, whether I was doing my daily 750 or in the middle of a writing session.

That's not good.

SO!  Here's the thing.  It's time for me to seriously change my internet habits.  Sure, I'll still visit Twitter to check in now and again, and I'll still be blogging on a weekly basis at my various places (here, Tumblr, and the 2 WP blogs), but other than that I think it's high time for me to take another vacation from social media, this one more permanent and extensive.

Point being:  What writing should I really be focusing on?  The 140-character bon mot, the comment of indignation, or the novels and stories I'm writing?

Oh yeah, that's right, I had a Dreamwidth account! Well, no more...I just deleted it (after doing a quick copy/paste of its contents, which was about 60 poems written over the course of 2 years). Looks like the last entry was over two years ago. And while I was at it, I deleted the Scribble Diem LJ account as well, as that one hadn't been touched in three years.

I need to do more of this in general, really...I know I'm signed on with a lot of websites and services that I never use. Not that it saves any room or whatever, but it's one less thing floating around out there that has stayed well past its sell-by date. [Wait...I still have a MySpace account?? Is that still a thing?] And I'm sure most of them I used maybe once or twice about eight years ago, but haven't used since. I have a list somewhere of these sites, I'll have to find it and see what I can delete.

Not antisocial--not in the context of going on social media and acting like a jackass. Lord knows enough has been said about that. And not in the context of refusing to log on because you've deemed social media the internet equivalent of the high school cafeteria where all the popular kids are talking loudly and happily, and you're off alone in the corner, glaring at them.

I'm talking about not being very social--that is, maybe logging on to Twitter/Facebook/LJ/wherever, maybe reading a few items, but not responding to anything (literally or figuratively), maybe not even staying for the drinks afterwards. It's not that you're finished with the drama...it's more that you just find yourself uninterested in any conversations that may be going on.

I guess that's where I'm at here...I mean, I like heading online to say hi to all my friends back east, or the newer friends I've made elsewhere that I've never met in real life, or the writers (professional or just starting out) that I consider friends as well as 'co-workers' in a way. On the same token, my slow retreat from social media over the past year has definitely been one of the best moves I've made personally. Once I shook off that habit of supposedly Needing to Be On Top of Everything, a lot of those priorities not only fell away, but after a while a lot of them started looking, well, laughable.


The major retreat for me was politics. I was never really all that interested in politics for most of my life, to be honest--sure, there was a bit of blissful ignorance involved early on, but for the most part I think there was also the fact that I tended to see the eternal battle between Republicans and Democrats to be like a sports event. Each team got together at certain preordained times and attempted to beat the snot out of each other to attain a hard-won victory. I hoped that these battles were at least for good causes, but I also knew and understood that the mindsets would eventually change around the next election cycle. Sometimes my team would win, but sometimes my team would lose and we'd be stuck with frustration for two to four years. Then things would change. Sure, I wished we'd all agree on something that works instead of what we want personally, but I didn't dwell on it. It wasn't until 2000ish when I started following politics with any seriousness, and even then I wasn't too vocal about it, nor did I have any really strong feelings either way. I only became more vocal about it by 2004, for obvious and varied reasons that I'll skip here. And by 2005 I was reading Daily Kos on a daily basis.

It came to a head around 2010 when I realized I was just getting too frustrated. I'd lost focus on what was important to me. Sure, there are political things that are important to me, but they're not my raison d'être...that's my writing and my ongoing research and fascination with music. Selfish? Maybe, but there's a line where I need to live my life and not everyone else's. Since then I turned it around and started focusing completely on what I really wanted to do--finish my trilogy, prepare it for submission, and work on other writing projects, and the last few years have been very fruitful for me. I may not be published yet, but the quality of my work is a hell of a lot better than it once was.


Part of the reason I brought all that up is just the way I view things on social media now. I think part of this line of thinking started when I started wondering why some of my friends are rarely online, if at all. I had a few friends from college that I never see anywhere online, so I've no idea what they might be up to these days. One of them was on Facebook but only to play those games we used to see all the time on our timelines; he did his own thing. There's another friend from the YC days who's on FB, but he and his wife only go on to post a few pictures or say hi to relatives and friends. I know of others who rarely if ever post anything at all.

It has nothing to do with not knowing how to post, or being opinionated and dismissive or even afraid of social media, or having ragequit the internet at some point...there are just those who don't find it all that important. They're the ones who post the kid pictures, the vacation pictures, the mundane "I drew/knitted/played with this today" updates. There's no Absolute Importance to it--it's just someone living life offline and wanting to share it online.

I just began to feel all the noise against that (directly and indirectly) was getting old. Sure, a lot of it's snark, but Snark as a Comedic Device gets old VERY quickly, at least for me. After a while it turns into a hack telling a dry old joke and nudging you in the ribs a little harder than necessary saying "Get it? Huh? Get it? GET IT? HUH? GET IT?" with increasing volume. Hell, even I've toned down the snark myself. I used to be downright biting in the Seinfeld 90s. Seriously, there are those of us who actually enjoy going online to check out what our friends our doing without each one of us trying to be a Comedian about it. There's something to be said that my college friend Kate posted pictures the other day of her oldest finally heading to kindergarten for the first time. It's sweet and it's fun...it serves no greater purpose other than the poster being proud of their kids or their creations. And I just never understood all the whiny bitchiness about those kinds of posts. Maybe you were just trying to be funny-snarky? I don't know, but the smartassery grew old a good couple of years ago. Sometimes I just like to enjoy the mundane, and honestly, is there really a problem with that?

Back to my point--it's not as if I'm ragequitting the internet myself here, far from it. There's too much good stuff out there to investigate, and there's a hell of a lot of great resources out there for my writing and my music interests. It's like I said earlier, I've just learned to block out all the Noise. I've defriended a number of people on various social platforms for no other reason than I just didn't feel like reading a lot of negativity. They could be totally fine people, and they can have whatever opinions they want, and they may need a platform to release some anger or personal issues, and I'm okay with that...I'm talking about the feeds that are filled with "NOPE" and "I'm just about done with humanity" and "Oh the feels" and other updates about All the Wrong in the World--the users with nothing positive to say, the ones who are actively and frequently posting (and crowing about) every injustice in the world. I'm not cutting people out of my life--I'm just choosing not to follow them on a daily basis. I can still look up their feed if I so choose. I'm just turning off the radio for a bit when I get tired.


Okay, that's enough blathering on for now. I've got a few other thoughts on this, and will probably post a bit more later.