My Brain Has Been Rewired

I'm convinced that excessive computer usage has rewired my brain, and maybe yours, too. And not in a good way.

Yesterday morning I got up and of course (!) checked Facebook before I even had coffee. I was surprised at how many other people had posted that they were already up and had been unable to sleep. I'd had another unsatisfying night, myself. After going to bed I'd been bothered by restless leg syndrome (previously only experienced in times of extreme stress). I had to get up around midnight, take a hot bath and a Tylenol PM in order to get some rest, and I was still the first one up in my house the next morning. Also on the subject of sleeping/not sleeping: twice this past week I've dreamed of web surfing.

At work at my regular job, I check my office email over and over and over, a million times a day. I could set it to automatically notify me; but no, I'd rather obsess. In short moments of downtime, such as when I'm waiting for my printer to spit something out, I check my personal email or look at Facebook or hit a website for whatever topic has crossed my mind in the last few minutes. (My mother-in-law has mentioned that she can never think of anything she wants to look up. To me this is incomprehensible. I can't STOP thinking of things I want to look up.)

Saddest of all, and I've heard this expressed by other readers, is that my relationship with books has been altered. Books have been the love of my life and until the past year or two, I dove into them and easily became absorbed. But lately I find it much more difficult. At present I'm reading a new book--one I had long looked forward to--by a favorite author, and instead of savoring the beautiful prose I'm impatient for the story to get moving, already, and show me some action. I still do pretty well when I return to favorite books from the past, but NEW characters and stories have their work cut out for them, trying to wrest my attention away from this magic screen in front of me.

It's almost as though we've conditioned ourselves to have ADD. No longer is it a way of life to concentrate on one thing at a time; EVERY job description uses the term "multi-task." We go through our days trying to do one main thing while flipping back every few minutes (seconds?) to another. I find this all disturbing. You?

Ruby Slippers

When my daughter Bliss was little, Target used to sell sparkly jewel-encrusted red shoes that reminded me of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Every time I went in the store I would look at them and think how thrilled she would be if I bought her some. But then I'd think, Don't be frivolous. That's ten dollars, or whatever, that could be spent on something more practical.

A hundred times I looked at them, a hundred times I never bought them.

Eventually Bliss got too old to be delighted by such things as ruby slippers from Target. And then one day I realized that I would never in my whole life have another little girl to buy them for.

Moral of the story: that's ten bucks I should have spent.

Belated Good Idea

The Sewanee Writers' Conference is about to crank up again. Last year's conference seems like yesterday in that I can still remember every detail of every room I entered, etc. I'll just come on out with it--I didn't have a great time at Sewanee. I did find it a valuable experience, just not in the ways I expected to. Anyway, I don't feel like going into all that, I was only going to mention that I was struck by an idea today, approximately one year too late.

I was reading a book by Margot Livesey, who was on the faculty at Sewanee last year, and I was thinking that I guessed she and my own workshop leaders, Jill McCorkle and Tony Earley, would all be convening again pretty soon. And I thought, wouldn't it be neat if the story I took to be workshopped last year had been published since then. I'd mail Jill a copy and she'd get it after breakfast one day, on that table in the dining hall where they leave your mail.

And what made me mad was that if I'd had this brilliant thought right after I came home last year, I could have made it happen. The thought of Jill McCorkle picking that package up from the mail table would have been inspiration enough for me to actually submit the thing to the requisite four million places until somebody took it.

Instead, what really happened was that I procrastinated for months before I FINALLY revised it in light of the comments everybody in the workshop had made, and then one day in a burst of energy I had about ten copies made of it, and then I dumped them on my office floor where they've been gathering dust ever since.

I'm not sure whether to say that the Sewanee workshop dampened my enthusiasm for the story I took, but I don't know that I'd ever care to participate in another. I dislike dissecting the work of others--I always have, even in literature classes. And I'm afraid it's been detrimental to me to picture a roomful of people dissecting mine.

Before, when I sent out a story, I imagined a lone editor reading it (sometimes, I know, only a paragraph) and either tossing it on the "not my taste" pile, or continuing, liking it, maybe fighting to get it into an issue of the magazine. Now I'm afraid that the workshop--the one and only workshop group of my life--will stick in my head forever like a Greek chorus muttering. Passing judgment.

I think it's one of those life situations where I was happier when I knew less.

Career Move?

I am developing such a collection of hoochie shoes that I'm thinking about starting a website for foot fetishists. (That's just a joke but believe you me, if I thought I could make a living at it...)

Ya like these? I do. I wish the zippers were silver, but I still like 'em.