@ 2:45PM
It was a weird weekend. It passed in a blur. Early Saturday morning, I woke up after only an hour of sleep with a stomach ache and my thoughts racing. I have OCD and I was just getting pummeled by intrusive thoughts - actual clinical intrusive thoughts, not the way folks stole that word and use it now. I did a decent job of resisting physical compulsions, the things I'd have to get out of bed to do, but the mental ones were a mess. I eventually got a little bit more sleep but that haze of half sleep feels like it settled in over everything and I only kind of remember it. All I can say is that I felt off for most of it, physically as well as mentally.
On Friday, Ria ran by the library to return some books and she picked me up a book about the TV show Parks and Recreation. We've been joking for a while now that green covers have been good luck when it comes to picking out a book I like and this was another success for the superstition. I wound up finishing it just after midnight today. I liked just being in that world for moment and hearing all the fun stories the author had collected in her cast and crew interviews. It got me thinking about how books feel like the opposite of social media - it's one thing, at length. I think it's why I've really enjoyed reading more during this experiment.
So far this month, I've only really missed Mastodon when I wanted to post something. I haven't really missed reading other people's posts all that much. Which admitting to that makes me feel kind of gross honestly. There are people I follow on there that I care about but I think I'd rather get an email or letter from them or read a proper blog post they've written. Mastodon is federated, which I love and is what drew me to it, but it is still an everything machine - life updates, jokes, US politics, environmental disasters, mutual aid requests, comics, nsfw, pictures of cute animals - and I don't think I like that as much as I used to. I'm honestly unsure whether I ever really did or whether it's been that desire for attention the whole time. And sure it might normal to want that, but that doesn't mean it makes my life any better.
I just always want to be sure to question the assumption that getting what I want is what makes life better, is what life is about. Because I sure have wanted some things that were actively bad for me over the years. I wonder how much social media, even federated, is one of those things.
I don't want to be a purist - like clean eating but make it technology - that isn't what I want to become at all. But I don't like that it feels like my choices are to jump in a blender or I don't get to be a part of the world. It becomes tempting to think that's what the world is, this vortex of everything. But when I take walks in the evening, my world is neighbors I wave hi to. My world is the clouds and the sunset. My world is the deer eating grass and laying up under solar panels. My world is also illness, menatal and physical. My world is student loans I can't pay back. My world is people passing away and the uncertainty that brings. My world is a mixed bag but isn't everything at once.
Given my age and that I quite literally grew up with the world wide web - I was released to the public just months after it was - I can't know whether I had closer friendships because I was young and in school or because certain aspects of the internet hadn't coalesced yet. Or how much of that is just nostalgia and I never really had close friendship and this is just what life looks like for someone like me. I sometimes wonder if I am what other people are afraid of becoming, the ones that primp and preen and currate their "presence" online and have the right jobs and hang out with the right people and never do anything to go against the masses. If this is what they fear, damn. It's not that bad really. I will admit I sometimes get tempted to play that game but mostly the thought just makes me feel tired. I've never been a good hoop jumper. So maybe this is just where that lands you.
This is all to say I often wonder how much of what I'm not getting from "social" media is about the context of the platforms themselves and the ways they've altered how humans socialize generally and how much of it is simply not in the cards for someone like me and wouldn't have been on offer even under different circumstances. How many of the friends I've lost are because the ease of social media made them unwilling to put in a little extra effort to keep an individual friend off platform and how many of them were never that much of a friend to begin with and wouldn't have kept in touch anyways? It's a series of questions without any knowable answers but I find it good for helping me pry loose my fixed ideas about techology these days. I don't want to blame it for issues that would have just happened anyways.
I joked with Ria this weekend that this experiment was supposed to be able susing out more about what I do and don't want to use a computer or phone for but in the end it seems like it's been most fruitful in teaching me about my reading preferences. I've noticed that I like to read nonfiction quite a bit and I prefer it in book form. I also really like graphic novels for winding down or the weird in-between times when I don't have much time to read. I've been getting through more fiction in audiobook form than book form. Poetry seems to inspire me to write the most out of anything I read. This all makes for an odd stack of books at my bedside but I've been reading way more this month than at any point in the last year.
Yesterday, Ria noted that she liked the kind of tired she was after a day spent mostly reading more than the tired she gets from being on her laptop for the same time and I'm finding that as well. It's not a purity thing. It's just a physically different kind of tired and I lack the bodily vocabulary to really distinguish one from the other. It's not life changing but I think I prefer it.
The only thing I wish I could figure out is how to connect with more zinesters outside of these platforms. I would much rather be sending some letters and zines to people's PO Boxes than just liking their stuff on a given platform. I'm not sure how to find out about zinesters and a lot of people aren't using or posting PO Boxes anymore. I don't want to give up making zines. I love it too much. But I also don't really want to have to be advertising my stuff or be on survailence platforms to find others. I miss forums, man. It seems like the old We Make Zines ning is defunct. An old school zine forum or IRC seems like it should already exist but I have no idea how to find it. If anyone knows, hit me up.
I'm over halfway through this tech break and so far, I'm not really sure how much I actually want back. This has shown me how much of Tumblr and Mastodon and Discord are really just habitual. They aren't sources of deep joy and the quick hits are sometimes more agitating than engaging. None of this is fixing what's difficult in my life but they are each one less thing to worry about - forks to pull out, fewer spoons to spend. And I mean as we say in this house - stack your buffs.