I’m succumbing to a little bit more “news feed creep” than is probably “legal.”
It’s hard to escape.
Even when I think I’ve barred all the entrances, I’ll find myself innocently opening a Google Search, and bam, right there below the search bar, sits a tantalizing bit of “Trending News.”
And what do I do? I hit it. Especially if it’s from The Times or The Post.
I never actually took those newspaper apps off my iPad, just my phone, and now I just don’t open my Ipad at all anymore for fear I won’t be able to resist.
It’s funny, because I’m now reading The Odyssey instead of The Times and The Post and I just read the part where Odysseus puts wax in the ears of his oarsmen and has them tie him to the mast so he can hear the Siren’s song, but they can’t, thereby saving them all from certain death.
Those icons for The Times and The Post are my Siren songs. I have voluntarily tied myself to the mast, so this means I can just as easily untie myself, so it’s best if I just don’t open the iPad at all this month and risk seeing them. I know I wouldn’t resist.
The latest missive from Cal was about leisure. He’s assuming that we all have more of it now that we’re not dinking around in social media all the time.
He had this great line about, “rediscovering the types of old school, dirt-under-the-fingernails, defiantly analog activities that used to fill our most satisfying leisure hours.”
Among the list of those kinds of things he mentioned as “defiantly analog” was starting a book club.
This is something I have been thinking about for well over a year now, but have never acted on. I was talking to Nicole Parsons after yoga the other day about this new Odyssey translation and she said, “You should really start a book group, Kath. If you did, I’d join.”
So yesterday I spent a good amount of time moodling and scribbling about this: how it might work, what the rules should be, etc. and I got it pretty much nailed down to the point where I think it would be an unquestionable new source of joy for me. I now have a rough draft of an email I’m going to send out to my peeps soon, and start to make it happen.
I think without this media break, I might have thought: I don’t have time for this. And I would have been right.
For me, this whole experiment has been all about reclaiming my time.
I still have worries about where news reading is going to fit back into my life after this, though. I need a slot for it. A place. I need guide rails, or bright lines, or constraints, or whatever you want to call them, where I can just relax about the news knowing that it all can wait. I’ll get to it, but it will be have to be on my terms.
This is still to be worked out.
