I've made a pact with Shane to use facebook just for one hour during this week. If one of us goes over the limit, they have to buy the other a milkshake. This is actually REALLY helping me, so let's hope it keeps working. 'Cause, really - that's ten minutes a day for six days, or 20 minutes on 3 days. Honestly, that's enough.
This is important for the musics to happen because if I'm on facebook, I'm not practicing. When I divert time from facebook, it usually goes into practice.
No huge music updates. I set some new goals for the summer. The one I'm most excited about is the storytelling thing. I've secretly wanted to be a storyteller for years. Technically, I did prepare and tell stories around a campfire at Halloween last year, so I suppose I can technically say that I am, but I haven't made any more moves on any more stories since. But, man - that was so awesome. I had a small but wonderful audience and they thoroughly enjoyed the stories. I picked stories that were not too scary, but mostly spooky and funny.
I've been told you need a niche to survive as a storyteller - a focus. I was discouraged by this for awhile, but the answer should have been completely obvious - I'd be nature-focused. Duh. So I actually put a "Wild Tales & Tunes Campfire" on the schedule for a Saturday evening in August for Lums Pond. If all goes well, I think it'll serve as a nice launching point for incorporating more storytelling into what I do. If it flops, it flops.
Obviously, I don't actually think it will flop - otherwise, I wouldn't have planned it - but you can't know these things unless you try. I just think it would be incredibly lame to arrive at the end of my life and find myself thinking about all the stuff I didn't do because I just didn't try. I don't want to wonder how it could have turned out.
Mary Oliver says it best in this excerpt from "When Death Comes":
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Monday, May 2, 2011
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...
"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...
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