WAG - Why am I unplugged?
Now there’s a question.
As is my typical practice over holiday vacations, I have been disconnected from many of my usual outlets. This is largely a self-implemented procedure I subconsciously find myself sticking to year after year.
This has been my routine for many years, though it has become more pronounced since I left for college in 2001. It is not always a move made in response to being deprived of fast internet connections or cable television – for I have had access to both and ignored them just the same. This season, I purposely left my computer back at college to prevent me from playing games too much, but other than that, there was no new rationale for the custom.
Of course in stating what hasn’t changed, I must be honest in saying I’ve rarely examined the status quo. Sitting here, I realize my inner motives are largely unquestioned. Maybe this is a good time to ask why have I, both presently and in the past, slipped away from e-mail, blogging, and other forms of networking I otherwise strictly adhere to?
Thinking…
As my mind flitters back to previous holidays. I can think of week-long camping trips where I poured over the events chronicled in newspapers on the way back. More recently, I can think of the 50-plus messages that had quickly accumulated in my inbox only a few days into Thanksgiving break (coincidentally, that was also the last time I found myself typing at this computer station).
It could be a wallowing in a petty luxury to be un-hassled by the self-proclaimed deities of cyberspace: Spam, Surveys, and other unsolicited, self-serving digital dreck.
It could be selfishness: a desire to be free from being forced to answer another’s beck and call.
I’m drawn back to the luxury excuse, for I rarely take the time to sit and finish a book from cover to cover or take up an equal, uninterrupted block of time watching DVDs.
Could it be a small-scale heredity revolution – a quiet self-recognition that this fast-paced world is not one in which man was meant to exist in?
Simple laziness?
Self-diagnosis is a fretful critter. While it may appear harmless and docile, it is far from domesticated. It isn’t even housebroken. It’s application can help one find indications, but the results are nothing to be banked upon by themselves. To give them that much weight is unwise and attributes them too much credit.
I think of self-diagnosis as a deranged performing monkey (or at least I will think of it as such through the conclusion of this metaphor): it is cute to consider but is not meant to build your life around.
Right now, I can see that I am too close to the situation to give an adequate answer to the question I’ve raised. This is a condition that won’t be changing anytime soon. I’m too immersed in the present holiday now to give an un-jaded view, and, I predict, in the future I will be too swept up in regular day-to-day activities to consider the trivialities that arise when one is tuning out and disconnecting oneself.
To further this contemplation on my disconnectedness would be fruitless, and thus, I am better off wasting my time on other matters.
'Already_switching_gears_even_as_we_type'
