Scheduled Rant

      Welcome to your regularly scheduled Josie-Rant™
      Today’s subject? Gosh, there are so many.
      I could rant about Obamacare (more specifically, against the whole broken American Health system and how tired I am of other people bitching about Obamacare when all I know is that my cousin’s kid can get proper care now when before he couldn’t, so I say Yay). I could rant about murder rates going up in our area. I could rant about pollution, global warming, constipation (ooh boy, could I!), racial relations, how unfair it is that I fucked myself up so badly that I may never be able to have a kid which isn’t unfair it is just my own stupidity getting paid forward. I could rant about wasting time on Facebook and Tumblr and-
      Yes!
      That’s what I’ll rant about.
      In movies & shows, people always have hobbies and things they spend time doing aside from work. They have time to pursue things they love. They make time. Plus, being fictional, they don’t have the luxury of real life – and no one wants to see “reality”, they aren’t going to show them sitting around with their iPads and laptops into the wee hours, scrolling through Tumblr or Facebook or whatnot.
      Real people seem to have lives that revolve almost exclusively around their phones and computers and tablets.
      They always complain about not having enough time. I know this because I am one of them.
      Yet when I stop and take account of how I use my time, a lot of it is utterly wasted. Sure, I write most nights, but never enough. I get frustrated by interruptions at work and give up, then end up scrolling down Tumblr instead. Or flipping through Facebook or Pinterest or Buzzfeed. And it is dumb. Wasteful.
      There are things I love to do and that I really want to do with my husband. D&D together, yes, but he’s a fan of puzzles, we both want to paint minis more often, writing (Always!) and reading. We want to learn some simple household repairs, build some furniture, travel around the area… Play with the puppy, train her to do cool stuff, get a second dog, or a third, and a cat, and a kid, and la la la la ♪♫♪♫
      But it is so easy to waste hours on the internet. People talk about the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). And yes, that’s utterly true. I want to know what all my friends & family back home are posting about. I want to see the cute babies and fun adventures people have.
      What I don’t want, is to waste my precious young life scrolling through Tumblr – even though I love seeing the artwork, historical fashions, feminist literature, and gaming stuff that I subscribe to – or flipping through Facebook seeing whiny wannabe writers bitch about their “depressed muses” or endlessly reblogged memes.
      Somehow, I gotta find a way to disconnect with virtual life and reconnect with REAL LIFE.
      Starting with my phone. I don’t use it as much as some folks, but I do use it. So I’m going to remove Facebook from it. Not email, because that matters, but definitely the FB app.
      Then, deleting or closing my Tumblr, Pinterest, et cetera accounts. Then, moving my computer away from the focus point of my world… just my work machine and notebooks, lots of notebooks.
      I’m enjoying all the letter writing, so why not go back to writing my novels by hand?
      …okay, so maybe I just long for the old days a little.
      But honestly, I want to garden and I want to write and I want to spend quality time with Mark. And mostly, though we’re together SO MUCH… we’re spending that time sitting side-by-side at our computers, not even playing games together anymore (they were too all-consuming) but just doing our own thing. Me blogging, he looking up DND stuff. Me Tumblr’ing, him looking up portraits.
      It is definitely time to reclaim our lives.
      Definitely.
      /end scheduled rant

Signed, Josie
Note: Image is “Desperate Couple” by (theodore99) from SXC.hu

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *