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Today's Keyboard Smash
May. 15th, 2021 07:31 pmLast night, I managed to have a dream about ending up in the hospital with some kind of head trauma. This primarily revolved around the difficulties of sleeping in a hospital. So I spent the dream falling asleep again and again. Possibly I am tired???
I am steadily stripping more and more media out of my daily life. News is now coming from a couple podcasts I trust. I'm not even watching clips from late-night shows about politics and current events. I'm just. Done. I'm watching old shows in the evening, rereading old fic, hell, I'm reading an old series of blog posts at this point. I've fallen off the wagon on reading books for the moment, but I'm not concerned. As long as I'm not doomscrolling the Youtube homepage, I'm not concerned.
2020, as it turns out, gave me some real bad media habits. Probably those were forming before the last year, but 2020 really pushed me over the edge. The election cycle had me on tenterhooks about every scrap of breaking "news," and I'm apparently only starting to detox from that now. It's not even that I don't care about current events--I'm still more or less aware of things going on in the world. It's that I've finally burned through that nervous energy that said SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN OMG GET READY at all times. Turns out there is more to life than the news cycle.
These two sections, by the way, are not unrelated. I've been dreaming more lately and more narratively. I've been daydreaming more. Spending more time without any recorded voices playing at me. I'm really hoping this all will add up to a recovery of some of my imagination. I keep thinking about how much daydreaming I did, say, in college. I had a lot of boring time to kill, time when my body needed to be present but my mind could do its own thing. I wrote a lot back then, in part because I had A LOT of ideas going spare.
That's pretty much my day job now, and yet I haven't gone back to those old habits. Even when I just listen to music, my mind doesn't get terribly creative. Mostly it thinks about things related to work or has fights with imaginary versions of real people. This is not a service I require. So I'm hoping, if I start weaning it off this diet of psychological poison it's been on, maybe my mind will start growing this again. Playing with its tinker toys. Hence also the replacement diet of beloved shows and stories.
I am steadily stripping more and more media out of my daily life. News is now coming from a couple podcasts I trust. I'm not even watching clips from late-night shows about politics and current events. I'm just. Done. I'm watching old shows in the evening, rereading old fic, hell, I'm reading an old series of blog posts at this point. I've fallen off the wagon on reading books for the moment, but I'm not concerned. As long as I'm not doomscrolling the Youtube homepage, I'm not concerned.
2020, as it turns out, gave me some real bad media habits. Probably those were forming before the last year, but 2020 really pushed me over the edge. The election cycle had me on tenterhooks about every scrap of breaking "news," and I'm apparently only starting to detox from that now. It's not even that I don't care about current events--I'm still more or less aware of things going on in the world. It's that I've finally burned through that nervous energy that said SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN OMG GET READY at all times. Turns out there is more to life than the news cycle.
These two sections, by the way, are not unrelated. I've been dreaming more lately and more narratively. I've been daydreaming more. Spending more time without any recorded voices playing at me. I'm really hoping this all will add up to a recovery of some of my imagination. I keep thinking about how much daydreaming I did, say, in college. I had a lot of boring time to kill, time when my body needed to be present but my mind could do its own thing. I wrote a lot back then, in part because I had A LOT of ideas going spare.
That's pretty much my day job now, and yet I haven't gone back to those old habits. Even when I just listen to music, my mind doesn't get terribly creative. Mostly it thinks about things related to work or has fights with imaginary versions of real people. This is not a service I require. So I'm hoping, if I start weaning it off this diet of psychological poison it's been on, maybe my mind will start growing this again. Playing with its tinker toys. Hence also the replacement diet of beloved shows and stories.
