SamSara in Dublin
The Google feedreader has been trimmed down to sources that have a very high chance of containing posts and articles I want to read, a far cry from the online firehose that gave me many little tidbits of news but nothing I could synthesize into storable knowledge. For instance, TechMeme and Gizmodo went right out. Twenty auto-posts at a time with no order of importance and mostly headlines of the geek I get anyway from colleagues, friends and D. See ya.
I also leave Twitter alone for hours and days at a time. As in shut it off, you’re done. You have to when you want to tell some on the timeline that they don’t have to retweet everything they read, especially CNN’s breaking news, but don’t have the heart to do that and/or unfriend them. So, you walk away.
Telling myself I don’t have to eat something because it’s there or was offered. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post on this. “The common reaction is ‘What did you do?’ And the only honest response is ‘Shove less shit down my throat.'” Let’s see how long I can do this. General relaxation, as in generally zoning out on the couch, helps quite a bit here.
Exercise. I’m not going to talk about the exercise until I see some marked results beyond simple maintenance. Like a bicep and a six-two-pack.
You know what the nicest thing was about being in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, besides seeing my friends and the Art Institute again? It was walking around the city for almost a couple of days with no real agenda. There was no “Oh my god, we have to be here at precisely 8:23 to catch the bus to X after which we need to hop in a cab to Restaurant Y to meet so-and-so and have pictures taken with her new baby and cut out of there so we make our reservations at Theatre Z.” Instead, I went to a farmer’s market, ate fresh donuts, played with ferrets, walked alone and with friends in the Loop, had a very casual dinner at the home of one of those friends, rode the L to nowhere, woke up late, wandered the Art Institute with no particular artist or exhibition in mind and quietly hopped on the plane back home. If you let people be, if you let yourself simply be, the world is a much softer and nicer place. I have to learn that, most of the time, nothing needs doing Right Now.
This is what I want for our upcoming trip to Dublin. Wander around, meet and talk to people, take in a museum or two. Very easy to do considering my fellow travelers – D and Killer. A day hike in the Wicklow Mountains south of the city is absolutely called for (hello, exposed Paleozoic igneous and metamorphic rocks from the Caledonian orogeny!), but there’s nothing that says we can’t saunter or stop at a pub on the way and back. Like I’m not going to with these two.
