Falling off the Wagon

[Native American Cemetery, Block Island, 2009]

"I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray."

— Stanley Kunitz, from "The Layers", in The Wild Braid (2005)


April 17, 2009

I’m falling off the wagon.

Our kids’ teacher — who is founding a school at her house in the woods — and I have been talking graphic design for her school and her neighbor has created the logo—a beautiful watercolor image with the name of the school around it. There was discussion about how to get the image from her neighbor to me. I suggested she email this to Jeff.

The other day I found myself idly saying, “just have her email it to Jeff.” This just didn’t feel quite kosher for this experiment — the thought of it becoming habitual.

Then, this morning J. had his laptop on the kitchen table. When I sat down with my cocoa, he handed me the little white ipod earphones and said I "should watch this." It was a little video on Avweb that P. and the editor of Kitplanes magazine had made on their trip — part 4 of a vlog. It was funny and he said if I wanted to see more there were several more listed on the page. I said that I couldn't do that but wanted to see them so he navigated about and clicked the links for me.

In terms of the context of this experiment, this was about the equivalent of having someone else hold the cocaine under my nose and taking a nice deep breath — that didn’t mean I snorted it on purpose, did it?

The Truth Hurts...Sometimes

Tell the truth and watch your life change.






February 28, 2009
Easton, MD

Sometimes when this experiment comes up in conversation, people get uncomfortable.

Totally understandable. It's like any other potentially inflammatory topic: politics, homeschooling, quitting drinking. I always try to defuse these conversations since I’m more interested in dialogue than in people being uncomfortable.
*
Talking with my dad just now about the weather, and my calculations about how many days per year I was spending just checking the weather. He loves to rib me. When I was a girl this really bothered me. Now I kind of enjoy it.

“You know, Jenny, there are other options besides spending that much time checking the weather,” he said (or something like that).

“Dad, I don’t self-regulate well. So I took a year. What’s a year anymore?”

“You’ll probably be worse when you go back to it,” he said, “e-mailing people at 3 o’clock in the morning you haven’t seen in twenty-five years.”

Ouch. The truth hurts. Or is that the truth?

Addictionphobia

"Give up defining yourself — to yourself and others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem."
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p. 109


February 26, 2009
Easton, MD

First trip to MD without the internet. It’s interesting. I usually use the internet as some kind of identity lifeline while I’m here but the weird part is that it’s actually easier to stay grounded without it. Since it was an addiction it was a way I used often to escape the effects of something unpleasant, often feelings in myself, which occur all the time. So it is new territory to be here and not be online.
*
Technophobe: I’m not a technophobe. I’m an addictionphobe. If it’s addictive it’s suspect. If it’s addictive it can be used to control. If it’s addictive it’s very likely at some point the addictive substance or thing will take control of the relationship without my knowing it.

Facebook? Run for your life!!!

[photo by Mia McCullough]

"Life is random as a rolled pair of dice. / What those thrown cubes will show no one can know, / yet everyone thinks he wants paradise." — Gregory Orr, "Paradise", from The Caged Owl

January 12, 2009 Monday

This addiction is very insidious. It’s kind of like food addiction, in that it’s something that for the un-addicted is innocuous, even necessary, but for me it can be poison.

And it’s an addiction to a truly virtual world — a world that is not really there. It’s a binary world that exists on computers. Those people on Facebook — they’re not really there in front of me. They are real people writing into the same servers I am, people I know. But they are not really there on Facebook because Facebook doesn’t really exist.

Is it just a form of collective insanity, a co-created reality, all run by very sophisticated computer programming? Like any other good media, the creativity is in the thinking up of it and the creating and maintaining and marketing of it. But the comsuming of it for purely social reasons? It is a more or less creative void, especially if people fall into the addiction. It’s like a form of sleep. Like a coma.