housemade, artisinal iPhones |
Oh dear. My thoughts won’t leave me alone today. I am supposed to be cleaning my disaster of a studio. Am listening to the Sundays—very loudly I might add—in hopes that it might drown out my thoughts so I can clean my work table of all the patterns left unassembled from my recent shipments. But alas, my monkey mind is chatting away and my ears, though filled with song, are hooked up to my brain, damnit. So here I am at the damn computer again. I refuse to turn down the Sundays as I type because I am in blogging denial and so my fingers feel rather frenetic and the dark chocolate I just ate is making me feel fairly hopped-up and invincible.
So what is so urgent that I have to write today? Only that I have succumbed. I have succumbed to social media. And I am none too happy about it. The Warholian fifteen minutes of fame have become the standard stuff of social media makers and anyone with any sort of a platform be it Twitter or a blog or Tumblr or YouTube or any of a number of damn cellphone apps that eliminate any need for privacy can have that fifteen minutes.
I swore I wouldn’t.
I said it was just for “brand building.”
Damnit.
Now half the time I feel like I am in some sort of a Portlandian technology loop (click here). And I still don’t do any of it well, but I do try…for the sake of the Brand. My designer just linked my Pinterest account to my blog. Seriously? I am not a taste-maker. Why would anyone want to see my pins? But it’s part of the gig. I mean, I told her to do it. It wasn’t forced upon me, but the bashful and inadequate part of me can’t understand why anyone would care. And I linked my Facebook posts up to Twitter. So that is something. And I have tweeted.
Blogging I do love, but the lesser social media arts 🙂 don’t come as easily. You know, writing poetry is much harder than writing prose and that is what Twitter is like for me. Succintness has never been one of my gifts. In fact, “effusive” was written atop several high school English papers by one of my favorite teachers, Mrs. York. She loved my writing, but made sure to mention that it was, in fact, effusive and couldn’t I try to edit some of the flowery descriptors?
Clearly not.
And so here I am with my scant three hours of work time and my need for catharsis and connection has me sitting on my ball chair (oh, yes, I DO have a ball chair and I am getting a core-workout as I type since that is one of my main forms of exercising—ball chair sitting!).
And so I struggle with this whole social media business because it has finally crept into my family life in a noticable way and my almost six year old says things like, “you are always staring at your computer screen” even though I am actually working and “she’s just over there tooting around on her phone” and the like. Oh dear god. Really? And my baby girl comes running up to me with my phone and says, “Mama, yuh phone’s wingin’!” I am one of those people now and I really want to stuff the genie back in the bottle. I was late to the smartphone thing and now I just want my damn flipphone back. No screen. No streaming Spotify. No Facbeook checking. Harrumph. Arrgh. The problem is that I kinda like all of it. It is fun.
My son actually made a homemade iPhone the other day out of cardboard and a magazine cutout and scotch tape. He drew another one for his baby sister so she could have one too. And we have all been sitting around the dinner table pretending to call each other and giving fake commands to a pretend Siri! “Search Lego kits, Siri.”
Thank you for allowing me this rant. I hope you have stopped reading long before now. I hope you are too busy tweeting out your basic daily functions on your own social media platform to give two flips about mine. But really, isn’t that just the problem? How can one listen when one is so busy streaming shout-outs to the universe?
I suppose I will figure it out someday and find a balance. I am spitefully not going to edit this writing. I am just goinbg to post it because I deserve any type-o’s, misspellings, or weird commas. I made my bloggy bed and I will lie in it. 🙂
hang in there …u will find balance…i totally have this same love/ hate thing going on w technology but i can’t imagine giving any of it up [especially seeing everyone’s creative goodness] xoxoxoxo