It has become fashionable among the digerati to lament the crushing burdens of life in the information age. For them, a day is simply not complete without sampling the hundreds of RSS feeds that litter their aggregators. It is difficult to be so connected. It is hard to keep the flood of information in check.
IHowever, I have recently been suffering from a malady that is completely opposite. Rather than being overwhelmed by the unstoppable sea if information, I find myself struggling to find something, anything, to hold my attention. My subscriptions page on 43 People collects the latest happenings from my friends and even the occassional distant acquaintance. I obsessively return. Has anything changed? Is there something new? Why hasn't anyone posted? There is, of course, a delay as content works its way through the system of feed readers and aggregators. Perhaps someone has posted something and it just hasn't shown up yet. And so I navigate to my Flickr contact's page, to my friends' blog pages, sometimes I even check my own blog in the desperate and completely irrational hope that I might have posted something and simply forgotten about it. And then I repeat the process again five minutes later.
I can hardly hold myself up as an example. The fierce rate of posts when I resumed blogging earlier this year has fallen off dramatically. And the occassional entries that I do write are a little to nonsensical to be of interest to any sane person. My most interesting posts recently were the series of pictures of the iPod that I had smashed to bits. WHile that might, in some strange analysis, be imagined to represent a commentary of the modern consumerist lifestyle, it is hardly the cutting edge, insightful content that I imagined I this blog would feature.
And so lacking adequate stimulation from the online world I retreat into my own isolated world searching for something to give it meaning, or at the least a moment of carefree amusement. I recently found myself walking through my apartment with my hammer in hand looking for something to receive the brunt of my pent-up frustration. My old hairdryer, which recently ceased functioning, received a treatment similar to the iPod's. Sadly, however, the results were not nearly so interesting and consequently there are no photographs to commemorate it.
The brief respite I have each week is attending Erik's "office hours". This was a truly inspired idea. For a few hours on Wednesday nights I can tear myself away from the lonely contemplation of a life wasted and incomplete, numbing the emptiness of a hollow existence and drowning cares away in the darkness of the night. Although it is likely that after reading this entry my invitation will be permanently revoked....
I think I need to subscribe to another hundred RSS feeds.
