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When I open up the Internet there’s always one thing that I do; I go to Facebook. It’s nothing that I ever think about either, it just happens. It can be quite a bothersome thing though because when I need to get work done and I have to go online, at times I will get distracted for hours on end just perusing the many pages of Facebook’s domain. It is at the same time a Procrastinator’s best friend and worst enemy.

To my dismay, we were given the task in class to not use Facebook for a week. It hasn’t even been an entire week and I hate this assignment. I had to disable my phone from getting Facebook updates so that the little notifications wouldn’t taunt me with recent activity. When I was through with that I said my farewells and signed off.

Naturally, my mind needed something else to idle itself with. So like a child to a shiny object I let my hands wander across the keyboard typing in “tumblr.com” and “twitter.com.” If I could not post to Facebook I would post somewhere else to get the social stimulation I craved.

Reading back on this I sound like a drug addict with regards to Facebook, and I find this both amusing and sad. In a way Facebook is an addiction I suppose. I’ve tried to “quit it” before and deactivate my profile for a period of time, but I’ve always found myself wandering back within a few days.

Though, in a way it makes sense that it’s so difficult to quit. See, Facebook has a trick that helps to ensure its users wander back to it eventually. It doesn’t really allow you to delete your profile. Instead it merely gives you the option of “deactivating” it and all you must do to get it back is login with your old information. That means you don’t lose any of your old information on there so users are more likely to be willing to return after they’ve deactivated it because it doesn’t take time to set everything back to your preferences, information, friends, etc.

I feel like a hypocrite in a way pointing out the lows of the social leviathan and still using it, but it is a useful site. For instance, I can’t wait to get back online and have easier access to the people back home that I don’t get to see down in Texas.

Alas, for now I wait.

And the words go on and on

Doing one thing uninterrupted for a prolonged period of time can be a difficult task. Personally, I have never really been able to do much of anything uninterrupted, regardless of the activity. On occasion I have been completely invested in an art project that I have allowed to just envelop my every action; but because of the intensity of my focus those projects haven’t lasted too terribly long. Anything that takes too long generally loses my interest anyways as I am always trying to find new mind-stimulating activities. So, when I was faced with the assignment in my ATEC 2322 class of reading uninterrupted for 40 minutes I shuddered at the sheer thought. It’s not that I haven’t been able to do that before, in fact on numerous occasions I have been so intoxicated by a good read that I wouldn’t put it down for hours upon hours on end, but it’s really difficult for me to just fall into something like that. Part of it is that the initial attempt to read is something that I always drag my mental heels through. The other part of it is that if I’m going in with an end in sight it is the only thing I can focus on. Unfortunately, I could do nothing to prevent these two blocks from occurring.

                When I began my assignment I looked at the clock to check my time and penciled down that I was allowed to stop reading at 9:56. That was bad choice number one. All I could do throughout my reading was to check the clock to see if time was up yet. Unfortunately the troubles began before that as even before the start of my reading assignment I must confess that I made a stupid choice of reading. I decided that I was going to read In Cold Blood. Now, this isn’t a bad read, in fact it was something I enjoyed, but I had read it before. This meant that the entire time I had even more reason to focus on the clock because none of the information I was reading was new information and therefore not mind stimulating. By the end of it I was honestly just excited to open up my computer and check out what was going on online.

                I feel like that’s how a lot of people today would react, and I’m not really advocating it. Honestly, I wish I could just do simple things like read without the technological word invading my life, but that’s the world we live in today. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something else that can anchor me into the real world and not dwell so much on internet world.