Quitter

Quitting Facebook is cool, but, like popping your collar or wearing a fedora, you'll probably look ridiculous to all but a select group. ~ The Huffington Post

Read a great article here that pretty much sums up my reasons to leave Facebook. Like the author, I was all the way in, until I wasn't. (I've just never been a half-assed social-media user!) Look, it's hardly earth-shattering this (first-world) decision to leave Facebook; yet, oddly in many ways, quitting Facebook is not untrivial either -- in this modern age, when you consider that 75% of all adults are on it! There's a reason why they say quitting Facebook is akin to committing social suicide; you really do feel disconnected from the perceived everyone. Even so, untangling myself from it (and what a huge IT it is: the contact of real friends and not, the dopamine hit of "likes," the chance to show off a photo or a cleverly worded thought) is nothing short of liberating. Astonishingly so. I find myself going about my day now being more focused on my projects, my thoughts, my emotions. It's like the cobwebs of distractions have been swept aside, partly exposing the raw nub of being alone, casting a faint glow of authenticity, as pretentious as that sounds. I can't explain it well -- it's like I'm my only audience now, so I gotta make it count. There's no image crafting, no need to present only the light flippant side anymore. The ugly pained side of me gets nurtured too.

A character flaw perhaps, but I'm innately wired to be extremely extreme in my likes; it's all or nothing -- I commit or withdraw totalmente. So I've had a good 6-year run on Facebook, perhaps too actively sharing photos and posting updates, never really understanding people who don't offer up anything on their page, yet check in almost daily as just about everyone does. But I'd been noticing more and more that the image I'd crafted -- more truths than lies to be sure, but still -- had become a caricature, a fun, engaging one, but a caricature nevertheless. 

I have a big personality; I've always known that. But Facebook enabled it to be magnified (and oftentimes reeling out of control), so that I found myself (and my friends' responses to me) becoming, well, predictable. The disconnect between who I was, an introvert with an extremely dark side, and what I was putting out there, this snarky fun-loving person, bothered me and even came up in conversations several times with real-life friends, giving me pause. And I haven't unpaused since, determined as I am to get to the root of my incessant need for approval and adoration, admittedly not an uncommon trait among humans, yes? 

Anyway, I've been wanting another life change for a while now (I guess the empty nest thing wasn't a big enough shakeup -- hah). I'm looking to take my writing to another level, and the idea of a social-media* fast in 2014 sounds pretty radical and appealing. Sure, there are friends whose posts I'll miss, but I'm hoping that if they're true friends, we'll connect in other ways. Change is good. Some changes are even great.

* I don't consider blogging social media, as it was around before the coining of the term, and evokes a different reaction in me, feeling qualitatively different. As such, I'm using this blog as my writing platform. No audience expected though welcomed.

The Value of Silly

It's recurrent. I'm chased by the men with no-faces past whirring masses of grey trees, their gain ever increasing until right when I'm about to be grabbed, a mere fingertip away, I wake up heaving in sweat. Or is it tears? The last time I had such a lovely nighttime vision, I managed to pull myself out of its heaviness only by Googling photos of puppies and kittens. Yes, puppies and kittens. It's cliched, but I know with a passion why sites like LOL Cats beget such devotion. They are the balm to our terrorized psyche. And there are so many terrors out there, aren't there? Little ones and bigger ones, piling like everyday dust into our psyche until they're indistinguishable, leaving us with only a vague sense of not being whole. For me, it's the Khmer Rouge. For you, it may be the inability to feel something for your wife.

The Germans have a word Weltschmerz, which broadly translates to world sensitivity or sadness or more precisely, the psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances. I prefer the broad definition, broad strokes only please, for the melancholy I'm wallowing in, no need for pinpointing. On the rare occasion I am more motivated, I disentangle the root of my restlessness and see that my inability to wholly function -- the word wholly is relevant, as I think I can fake it with the best of them -- stems from my early childhood. It's like no matter how much I pretend to be gregariously "normal" at a social function, something in the deep recesses of my psyche screams, but you're different! You made it out of Phnom Penh a mere day and a half before the men with no-faces swept in and gunned down your family and entire country. So fake it if you must, but here's the truth. And then I'm left standing there, the gregarious smile fading, covered with only figurative sweat. Or is it tears?

So yes, today I am a silly person to an extent, the silliness being my balm, my own personal LOL Cats. Perhaps these little pastimes preoccupy me to a greater extent than they should any sane adult, but as such they've been successful at keeping the heaviness at bay. Instagram? Anti-fashion fashion? Selfies that re-form my identity? Yes, yes, yes. 

The Everyday Dust of Life

So it's been a few years since I updated this blog, for a multitude of reasons, none too interesting to note. I lied; I like to note everything, so see below reasoning. And wow, in the elapsed years since my last post, everyday tech has changed so much! I mean, Instagram wasn't even around then (and seems so passé even now) and I hadn't yet discovered the (ironically annoying) convenience of the DSLR-replaceable iPhone camera! Indeed if I had foreseen how my lazy self would banish the clunky Canon DSLR from daylight forever, I'd have saved major bucks splurging on various lenses. But I digress.

So why has it taken me so long to get back? For starters, I think I fell into a serious detour with Facebook, using it as the pensieve for my "artistic" (loosely used) output. Being a creative type, I've always found it necessary (for my mental state) to relentlessly produce -- crap or not, I was seized with thoughts in various permutations (photos not the least of which) -- and FB just made it so easy to dump the excess reflexes of my musings. For a while it worked; I liked having an instant audience for -- to steal from Beauvoir's* biographer -- the "everyday dust of life." But it's an empty sort of receptacle, isn't it? A shallow feeding bowl, lacking in thoughtful sustenance, so that again and again I came up starving, creatively malnourished.

Enough. This staycation has shown me that left to my own devices, given ample blocks of time, I still have it, whatever that is. So I've returned to my memoir project, and I'll keep returning to this blog to deposit the first and last vestiges of my everyday dust. It feels good to write again.  

* I'm currently reading "Letters to Sartre" by Simone de Beauvoir and reminded again of how much I love peeking into other people's relationships through their personal letters. Almost as good as Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" to Sylvia Plath.