Last Christmas, my husband gave me Pixar's animated feature UP. "You remind me of Ellie," he said. "And I want us to grow old together." I almost started crying.But I secretly feel like Dug the golden retriever, uber-geek among alpha dogs. He tells grouchy Carl, "My name is Dug. I have just met you and I love you."
Dug talks incessantly, except when distracted. And he's easily distracted: "My master made me this collar. He is a good and smart master and he made me this collar so that I may talk – SQUIRREL!!"
Dug stares transfixed at a tree. But it's a false alarm.
1.
Recently I went down like a ton of bricks – a chronic pain syndrome that renders me useless from time to time.
After several days, I dragged myself to the computer and checked my email. Then I just sat there. Twitter? Facebook? One of the 40-some blogs I follow? (How do people follow hundreds?)
The screen blurred. My fingers twitched. I felt unfocused and distracted and hadn't even opened a web browser.
I'd put it down to illness, except this wasn't the first time. And it's become more pronounced recently, since I started blogging and following so many blogs. I felt like Dug, when Russell the Boy Scout adjusted his collar:
Hey would you-
(click)
-cuerdo con tigo-
(click)
I use that collar-
(click)
-watashi wa hanashi ma-
(click)
-to talk with, I would be happy if you stopped.
Inspired by Jennifer Louden, I decided to take a digital sabbatical. My conditions of enoughness:
- Abstain from Facebook, Twitter and blogs
- Answer personal email only, once each evening
- Do something creative that doesn't involve a computer or a skillet
But at least it gave me time to reread Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" in the bathroom.
2.
Yup, the bathroom library still holds that 2008 issue of The Atlantic. I reread it now and then for reassurance, though I seldom get past paragraph two:
Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain . . . I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. . . Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.
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| "Excuse me, Igor. Is that one mine?" |
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