Thursday, March 31, 2011

Deleting my facebook: AHHHH

I am all kinds of tempted to get my facebook back.

"But I won't be able to talk to that nice guy I talked to a few days ago..."
"But I won't be able to organize get-togethers with my friends..."
"But I was admin for my kinship group and our open-mic group..."

Truthfully, yes, I use facebook for a lot of stuff. I'm surprised at how many things I use it for.

Unfortunately, I'm an addict. Very much an addict. I'd estimate that I spent 2-3 hours a day on facebook, all told. I do have a few other forms of social media, but none are so addicting as facebook. Typically, I'll check my profile, check my wall, then check some of my friends' music pages, maybe post a link or two, then do it all over again to see if anything changed in the last few seconds.

Basically, I'm doing a whole lot of nothing. I think I realized this after the Rebecca Black video came out. It was everywhere. Positively everywhere. And then there were remixes. And then somebody made a "Hitler's response." And I realized that the sum total of my time on facebook amounts to mental junk food. With an occasional apple or carrot to try to throw karma off a little.

I don't have time or energy for junk food. I've been busy writing music for Jed's videogame, teaching lessons, and, last night, playing a for-real gig for the first time up here in Delaware. I'm trying to think about recording, launching a website, commissioning music videos from my sister, developing better materials for my students, entering a songwriting competition... did I mention that my regular job is bumping up to 40 hours a week next week? To be honest, it hasn't even occurred to me that it means I'll have more cash -- all it's meant so far is "HOLY CARP HOW AM I GOING TO DO EVERYTHING!?"

So you see, there's no room for distraction. And on my own, I never would've chosen to turn from that distraction. My inspiration comes from the Bible. Because, yeah, I'm called to do this music mess. I know it. So engaging in distraction from this is, to me, sin. And it pretty explicitly says in several places to turn from sin. I'm thinking of the more graphic depiction where it actually says "if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off." (Man, I love the Bible... I love the rawness of it sometimes. Read that mess, there's nothing boring about it. Except for maybe Leviticus. Even my student Bible says it's the most boring book in the Bible.)

So, rawr, cutt'n my right hand off here. And I'm having temptations to try to reattach it, but for the most part I know that it's only temptation, God's got me, He'll move me however He needs me to move and He don't need no facebook to do it.

To be honest -- I don't know if I expect this to be forever -- at first I was sort of like, let's just see how long I can last without it. But I'm starting to feel more relaxed and focused, and I'm honestly quite enjoying that feeling...

4 comments:

  1. yay! I deleted my facebook for Lent last year and I absolutely loved it. I didn't want to reactivate it although my friends strongly suggested that I do for pics and campus events.

    Also, Leviticus is boring but I love it for the simple fact that it is God's rules and vision for His people and how they should live. If you look at why those rules existed and His passion for healing the broken and including the weak and the outcasts, I think it's an awesome book.

    And yay and kudos to you for following God's calling for you to do music! yayay!

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  2. Ooo... yeah. I didn't mean to put down Leviticus. Obviously all the parts of the Bible are important. I just thought it was funny that even the student bible had a disclaimer saying, "this is one of the hardest books to read."

    Thanks for the comment ^^

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  3. facebook is the worst. how do you still have a music page active but not your personal profile though??

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  4. @michael- Simple. I made a separate account using my music email and transferred admin powers to it. I made that profile unfindable (I think... Or at least, I just won't accept any friend requests)

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