Seven months later: thoughts on parenthood

Christy and I were married for over 12 years when Macrae, our first child, was born. In those dozen years, we were completely happy. We were content in who we were, we supported each other through some really tough life circumstances, we were not lacking anything. We were happy.

And honestly, if we had chosen to never have kids, I think we would have lived a full, complete, joyous life and marriage.

But seven months later, I am so glad we have Macrae. I would not change our decision to have him for anything.

It’s not that he completes our marriage, or family; we were complete before him. And, honestly, a baby puts strain on a marriage. Not a huge strain, especially given some of our previous ones, but a real one.

It’s not that he completes us as people; we were pretty certain of who we were, who we wanted to be, and how to get there. (Hint, it involved dependance on each other and God.) And in fact, having him has forced us to change out of who we were, and adopt new (similar) selves and adjust to a lot.

And it’s not that he’s the best baby ever. OK, so maybe he is. But that’s not the point.

The thing about becoming a father is that your “me” becomes bigger. I went from being guy/geek/husband (not necessarily in that order) to dad/guy/geek/husband. That’s huge. My sense of individual self just got 33% bigger, maybe more. But my collective self, the “me” that includes myself, my family, my friends, my community, my dogs, etc., grew by orders of magnitude more. Because my family now includes a “Me 2.0″, a helpless thing that needed me or my wife every few minutes just to live. That’s like having your collective “me” grow by 75% overnight. And I mean grow, because none of the other things get smaller in your life, your life just gets that much bigger to accommodate.

I understand love in newer, bigger, deeper ways today than I did 8 months ago. And I’m pretty sure that this is the time to remind myself that that means that no one, myself included, has half a clue what love really is, because there’s no way any one person can have lived all of it. But I have a bigger picture now, and will take the opportunity to look around, and try to see so much more of all that love can be.

And that is a huge gift that Macrae has already given me.

And he didn’t have to. Because I love him. Because he is as perfect as humanity is. And as flawed as humanity is. And he’s my son.

Collective derangement and a coming election

I read an article in my local paper about Tim Walberg, the Republican candidate for Congressman in our district, and his recent questions over Obama’s citizenship. The short version: he’s not saying that Obama isn’t a citizen, just that he hasn’t really satisfied his critics on the issue, which is kinda suspicious.

When I read the article, I knew that even if I agree with Walberg on 100% of the issues, I cannot in good conscience vote for him, because he is either mentally unfit for the job, or has no character. Here’s why:

You have to actually stick your head in the sand and choose not to look at evidence in order to believe that Obama is not a US Citizen or otherwise unfit for the presidency on some technical grounds. The evidence is not only readily available, it has been readily available for over two years now. There is no actual evidence to refute that he is a natural-born US citizen. Yet there are still tons of conspiracy theories out there that he is not.

And 25% of the US population thinks he is “Was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”. Not surprisingly, 45% of Republicans think so. So when Tea Party members ask the Republican candidates whether they believe Obama was born overseas, they put the candidates in a tight spot. If they are intellectually honest and have looked at the evidence, they will know that it’s all ridiculous conspiracy theory. Yet if they say that, they risk the ire of the Tea Party, and of they don’t, they look like fools to the rest of us. So they can choose to be honest and potentially lose votes, or smarmy to try to keep them.

And here’s where the irony kicks in: At this point, every Republican candidate can speak honestly, because they Tea Party will vote for him. It’s really just a subset of the republicans (by which I mean those who are Republicans, and those who are not, but vote R 90+% of the time), as evidenced by the fact that all of the candidates that they back are Republicans. Even if they are mad because a candidate thinks Obama is a citizen, they will still vote for him to keep the Democrat from winning. (And, ironically, they shouldn’t care at all, because they claim they are all about fiscal conservatism, not unrelated conspiracy theories.)

So this is their chance to actually get elected and also start to end the intentional collective ignorance that causes this in the first place.

But they won’t, because the lie helps feed their narrative that the Democrats (headed by Obama) are the bad “others”, and that the Republicans (led by the Tea Party now instead of the corporate interests, really!) are here to save them. And the worse they can let their base believe the “others” are, they better they look in comparison. So they maintain this intentional ignorance, and push it toward a collective derangement.

To cease: living sabbath/shabbat/שבת

Gratitude.

It’s the one word that describe how I feel about having actually learned about sabbath.

I grew up in a Christian religious tradition that didn’t really concern itself with sabbath. When the word was even heard, it usually meant some ancient Hebrew tradition and/or law that mandated taking one day a week “off”, but that now means all good Christians go to church on Sunday mornings. It meant nothing to me.

When I went off to college, I heard the term sabbatical and wondered how it related. And as I studied Scripture (and the study of Scripture) I learned of ancient Jewish laws and customs of weekly sabbath, seventh year sabbath, sabbaticals (aka shmita or שמיטה), and more. But somehow they remained ancient for me, and I relied on the classic American weekend methodology with its triple get-chores-done + go-to-church + veg-out mentality.

In Colorado I met my older-brother-by-another-mother, Bill Griffis, and began to have my spiritual worldview blown apart for the first time since college. Somewhere between reminding me that people don’t go to church, people are church, and introducing me to good wine (for which I am forever grateful and will ever be frustrated with him), this Southern-Baptist ordained pipe-smoking motorcycle-riding übergeek mentioned a few times that he had been going to Shabbat on Friday evenings. (Among his other wonderful peculiarities, he attempts to live out the First Testament law out of his love for Jesus.) I cataloged it away as a fascinating and probably-better way, but did nothing else with it while in Colorado.

In retrospect, I wish I had experienced it then.

A year ago, as part of her MSFL, Christy took a class “Spirituality in Everyday Life.” It covered, among other topics, sabbath rest, and included Wayne Muller’s book Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest. Christy was blown away, and made me read part of it.¹ I was blown away.

It was only then that I began to understand sabbath. The Hebrew word, שבת, literally means “to cease”. Christy and I began a practice of coming home from work Friday, making dinner, and then ceasing until Saturday evening; we sabbathed. What we “did” in those times varied, from reading to napping to games to bathing together to occasional physical labor (which was still ceasing the tedious mental work of our work weeks.) We were not rigid about it; that seemed to miss the point. But we rested.

There’s no way I can explain to you why ceasing restores the soul so fully, I simply know that anyone who can manage to do it will not remain unchanged.

We stuck with it pretty regularly for about a six months. When her classes started back up in the fall we fell off a bit, and between work, her studies, and pregnancy, we’ve fallen pretty much off the wagon.

Until today.

Today, we moved slower. It was the same things: get home from work, make dinner, do some chores. But we simply did everything slower. We took everything at its own pace, rather than a frenetic pace to get on to the next thing. And I felt. And I felt rested.

And I think it may be time to start sabbathing again.

¹ I would have read the rest of the book, but at the time it seemed more important to resta than force myself to finish. I don’t consider this ironic, but fitting.

reflections on 40 days of tweetfasting

I’ll start with honesty: I am writing this for me, not for you. Sorry. I just need to get my thoughts in order before moving on, and this is a great place to do it. And since I thought it may be interesting to you, I’m sharing it.

Back on April 10, I dropped out of social networking. And on April 16, I spoke of the lessons I had learned up to that point. It wasn’t until about a week ago. that I realized I was no longer craving Twitter or Facebook, and it was safe to come back in the water. I don’t know how long I had not craved it; that was when I noticed. And being the sort that I am, I decided to choose a date in the future to come back; 40 days seemed a good mark.

Before I ever tweeted, I un-followed. I dropped my follow list by almost 30%. I removed people who I don’t really know well and will never see again, people who have not tweeted in over a year, etc., but that only accounted for a few. More importantly, I removed what I call non-people: jokes (@darthvader) and bands (@overtherhine) and public personas (@zefrank) and businesses (@thinkgeek) and all news or news-like. (Some of those were really, really hard to drop.) In short, I dropped everyone that I don’t personally know, with the exception of a few folks whose tweets almost always are spiritually significant (@lensweet). (By the way, if you see any that you don’t think meet that category, call me on it!)

The reason I did this: I decided that I want Twitter to be social networking. That may seem obvious. But I realized that I get to choose who I am social with online. Again, that may be obvious. But how many people have stepped back and intentionally chosen whether or not they want celebrities (who will never be able to care about you as a person) or businesses (who want you to follow them so you patronize them so they make money) in their social circle or not? I don’t want my circle to include people who will not be in my circle. Or rather, I don’t want to take (socially) from people who will not be in relationship with me. That’s not who I am; it seemed best to adjust my Follows to account for it and keep myself in line.

And the reason I’m back online? I realized the value in social networking. It is actually quite adept at bringing people who have relationships with each other closer into relationship. For people who I know, that I will see again in a week or a day or a year, it keeps me closer to them. In Real Life, most of the interactions with people, even in deep relationships, are very shallow. “How are you?” “How was dinner?” “New car?” With Facebook and Twitter, you actually get those with more people, and you get a lot of the small talk out-of-the-way before you even meet up in Real Life. When I stopped doing social networking, people who used to ask my feelings on the latest details on Sprout were instead asking for the latest details on Sprout. By the time I got through the update, they didn’t ask the deeper question. And I found myself often longing for the details in people’s lives. So, I’m back.

(Note: this does not work for every relationship. Some are too distant. In others, you may grow more distant when you realize how much you have you disagree about. And some are too close to get closer this way: Facebook simply cannot bring Christy and I closer together. But it seems to work more often than not amongst real people.)

I have not yet filtered out Facebook. I know I will do it differently; it is a different animal altogether. And I still have not checked lolcats or failblog, and only occasionally looked at news. I’ve poked back at political blogs very cautiously; I think I may have to save those for weekends only. I’ve learned that I need to move slowly; even more, though, I’ve learned that I need to move intentionally.

Failing forward: Thoughts on Jennifer Knapp, militarism, and me

In case you have not heard yet, Jennifer Knapp recently came out. I’ve been living under an intentionally large rock recently (and I always try to stay under one concerning mainstream/pop Christianity news) so I’m not sure how many waves this news made. The one article I caught on the Christian radio and bookseller reaction suggests it’s exactly what I’d expect: mostly ignoring the new album and hoping the news goes away.

In a nutshell: She’s finally back to the music business, and is in a committed (8 year) same-sex relationship. And she still loves God, and wants to make music. How do those work out for her?

The Bible has literally saved my life. I find myself between a rock and a hard place—between the conservative evangelical who uses what most people refer to as the “clobber verses” to refer to this loving relationship as an abomination, while they’re eating shellfish and wearing clothes of five different fabrics, and various other Scriptures we could argue about. I’m not capable of getting into the theological argument as to whether or not we should or shouldn’t allow homosexuals within our church. There’s a spirit that overrides that for me, and what I’ve been gravitating to in Christ and why I became a Christian in the first place.

I’ve always struggled as a Christian with various forms of external evidence that we are obligated to show that we are Christians. I’ve found no law that commands me in any way other than to love my neighbor as myself, and that love is the greatest commandment. At a certain point I find myself so handcuffed in my own faith by trying to get it right—to try and look like a Christian, to try to do the things that Christians should do, to be all of these things externally—to fake it until I get myself all handcuffed and tied up in knots as to what I was supposed to be doing there in the first place. If God expects me, in order to be a Christian, to be able to theologically justify every move that I make, I’m sorry. I’m going to be a miserable failure.

While I can’t say I agree with her theologically, I can at least see where she’s coming from. She’s found a fulfilling relationship and lives in it monogamously, and is trying to work out her faith inside that context, and has decided that that is, for her, one of the negotiables allowed by the grace of Christ.

Let me say again: I disagree with her. However, I wish more people would follow her example and struggle through, wrestle with, and intentionally choose their negotiables of Christianity. Because we all have them. All of us.

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“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

If you have been a Christian for more than a month, you have read this bit from the Sermon on the Mount at least once, and probably heard a few sermons on it as well. After Jesus explains how a few older outer-edge restrictions (adultery, murder) needed to be restricted inward (not even lust, hate allowed) he goes after the former rule of maximum allowed repayment for evil and says what may be the most radical line in Scripture: “Do not resist an evil person.” If the bar could be set any higher, I can’t imagine how.

And though this was, for the first 300 years of Christianity, taken to mean Christians were to live completely non-violently, and there have been always been non-violent groups throughout Church history, most Christians today take a watered-down view of this at best. The positions vary, but the fact that polls show Evangelical Christians had (have?) a higher support than the general American populace for the war in Iraq and even for “torture against suspected terrorists”, and that there are multiple Christian-based gun ownership sites, suggests that most would take a more “nuanced” view of these texts.

Or, to put it another way, if you are a Christian not living radically non-violently (turning the other cheek, not resisting an evil person, praying for good for those who persecute you), you have made a literal interpretation of these scriptures one of your negotiables.¹

Some of the people in this camp have struggled through, wrestled with, and intentionally chosen this as one of their negotiables of Christianity. If they have, I respect them for it. But having grown up surrounded by, and having been taught by, a large number of them, I suspect that an unfortunately large percentage of them have not.

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There’s another area where far too many American Christians have negotiables without struggling over them. Let me tell you about one of my own uncomfortable negotiables.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal….
No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. [link]

Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” [link]

Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. [link]

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” … Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” [link]

I live in a nice house, on acreage, in the country, in the USA. Any of those things puts me in a small percentage of wealth by some measure (local, global, horometrical.) I have a European sport sedan, an SUV, and a motorcycle. More than half the foods I eat are whole or organic or natural. There are a whole lot of people with more wealth than I, but there is no way I can be intellectually honest and still claim, in the long run, that I do not have wealth. And it should be quite obvious from my description that I have yet to sell all I have and give it to the poor.

I do not take this lightly. Christy and I agonize over how to both hold to the teachings of Christ and, well, have things, live in America and automatically be in the top 2% of world wealth, and more. It’s really hard.

One thing we have tried to do, and do more and more, is reduce/reuse, buy used, make it ourselves, etc. And when it comes time to buy something, actually spend a little more to buy one that will (probably) not wear out, causing us to spend more in the long run. And we often just don’t buy things, and intentionally reduce our exposure to any media that will try to convince us we need to buy something. And we give away things and money and time and effort, though really not anywhere near what we could. It’s really, really hard. And we have struggled with it, are not totally at peace with it now, and will probably always wrestle with it.

But I have not sold my house, cars, iPhone, clothes, furniture, books, computer, tools, and everything else and given it to the poor. Because it’s one of my negotiables.

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Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in someone else’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from the other person’s eye.[link]

When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”[link]

Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister.[link]

If you somehow manages to get through all three of the previous sections without judging Jennifer, me (for wealth and/or writing this at all), or a militaristic church culture, congratulations. But I find it unlikely that you did. I know I didn’t, even though I’ve been trying the whole time I’ve been writing. Because we are repeatedly, blatantly called to not judge, and yet it seems impossibly hard not to. (Just do a Google search on “judging others” for pages and pages of rationalizations for it!) It seems to be one of the negotiables that is held by every single person I’ve ever met. (I will admit that there are some who find it more negotiable than others, and a few heros of mine that strive to make it non-negotiable)

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Here’s the whole point. We all fail. We all have negotiables. Some are big ones, some small. Some we struggle over, some we defend as God’s truth. Many we inherit from our culture, and they are so ingrained that we absolutely will not see them. But we all have them.

And there comes a point where we have to extend grace. I believe that, as Christians, that point should come immediately, always, regardless of circumstance. But I suggest that that point must come at the point where someone says, “I know there are scriptures against this, I’ve fought about it, reasoned on it, and though I may not be comfortable with it, I think it’s probably acceptable, so I’m going to call it a negotiable and do my best to serve God.”

At this point, they (and I’m part of they, and so are you) are still sinning. But that’s part of being human. And that’s where that whole undeserved grace thing comes in. We are sinning, all of us, but that does not mean we cannot love and serve God as he cleanses us.

We all fail. The trick is to fail forward into the grace of Christ, and allow his Spirit to help us fail a little less.

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¹ There is SO much to write about this. Yes, I know about Just War Theory, and the Old Testament, and Jesus telling his disciples to buy swords (and the counterarguments) and probably any of the other arguments you may pull out. I grew up hearing them spoken as if Gospel. And I’m not trying to refute them here. Really. I just want to point out that they, like the other bits mentioned, are all arguments that we use to not follow Jesus’ words explicitly. If enough people bug me about it, I’ll try to expound in another blog tome.

Updates from Colorado

Well, it’s been an interesting trip so far.

On Friday night, as the plane descended into Denver, Christy started to feel quite nauseated. I figured it was the pregnancy mixed with the rather turbulent flight. I’d been reading Merton, and in some way that’s not explainable was both very, very close to who I truly am, and experiencing very richly the nearness of God. When she started to get nauseated, the most obvious truth to me was that I would pray for her belly and the nausea would not overtake her. And so I prayed, from a deep, deep place of no words. And we landed without incident.

But on the drive through snowy weather down into Colorado Springs, she lost her dinner along I-25. And again a block from her parents’ home. And then again several times at home. And by 1:00 AM Colorado time, her temperature was rising, her stomach kept trying to re-empty, and we knew it was time to go to the hospital. She had food poisoning from a burger in Chicago.

The new St. Francis Medical Center near her parents’ house is quite nice. We were quickly cared for as if we were people, not patients, with great compassion and skill. And they gave her medicine and an IV for hydration, and around 4:00 she started to sleep in short fits. About thirty minutes later (24 hours after I’d awakened in MI) they even set me up to sleep in the empty next room over, perhaps so I would not fall asleep in a folding chair, then fall off and need stitches.

At 6:00 they awoke me. She was still nauseated and running a small fever, and they needed to admit her. By 6:30 we were in a nice large room in the Mother and Child wing (if you are pregnant and sick, that’s where they send you.) I was quite glad to utilize the loveseat there to rest on, though I only got sleep in short bits and only till about 9:00. We found out later that it was the very room her brother and sister-in-law were in post-delivery.

In the morning, I walked the hospital. And I became a bit more Catholic. This is a very Catholic hospital, or perhaps even a cathedral with a core mission of serving the sick. Lofty, spiritually tinged spaces, religious iconography, statues of saints (including a Madonna and Child in the maternity ward…) and stained glass and profound spiritual art of all sorts everywhere; by the time I reached the chapel I was nearly out of breath with the closeness of God. I wept in a half-dozen places there, prayed in the chapel, dreamed by the artwork, and made the Sign of the Cross with Holy Water (a two-for-one first for me.) For my whole time in Colorado, and especially that morning, the Veil has been very, very thin.

I only left the hospital a little on Saturday, going to get coffee with a former intern and current friend of mine from Spring Arbor who now lives in Colorado Springs. I Saturday night I folded out the loveseat and slept on it, and confirmed Josh’s tale of its uncomfortableness. Sunday morning I went home and showered, went to Vanguard with Matthew and his wife Brienne, and then headed back to pick up Christy. She was finally discharged from the hospital as the nausea was over and her temperature was normal and steady and she was eating. (She got home and slept more, though.)

That felt like a week-long ordeal, but was only the first thirty-six hours or so. Since then we’ve started in on some projects, had lots of talking time with mom and dad and Josh and Lindy, had some time with baby Lorien, and still have a whole day left. But we also have watched their oldest dog as he prepares to die. It’s been a complete mess of a trip.

Thoughts from the road

First off, my Twitter fast is still in effect. I say this because one thing that happens on a fast is you become reflective about the topic, and thus I’ll be talking a bit about it yet again.

One great thing about social networking is that you have an idea what is happening in the lives of the people on the periphery of your life, and they know yours. Fasting from it removes a lot of needless connection, but a lot of valuable info as well.

For instance, you probably don’t know that I’m on my way to Colorado right now. Had I been tweeting, you would know that Christy and I are going to help her parents get their house ready to sell, and that it was a last-minute trip. We will be getting in quite late tonight, and leaving Wednesday afternoon.

So right now we are in Minneapolis-St. Paul airport on a layover, after flying out of Chicago Midway, and here are my observations so far.

First is that I’m glad I live in the country. It has it’s downsides (no good restaurants or shopping, the occasional scent of manure,) but Chicago felt noisy, jammed with people, and smelled of pollution. I’d like to visit and actually do some of the cool stuff there, but I will always be ready to go back home.

Technology is slowly moving from something we do to something we are. Airports have wifi everywhere, but you have to pay. The bathrooms at MSP all have codes, and if it needs cleaning you are to text the code and a description of the problem to the number provided. (See first photo below.)

I’m a complete nerd. The F1 key is a universal command for “help”. So just walking through an airport can trigger my nerd reflex, as seen in the second photo.

And I still get bored easily, and need to read or write, but have to kill distractions to read anything worth reading. Since I can’t do that in the terminal, I blog from my phone.

See you in Colorado.

A few quotes from a prophetic voice

The American ideology of freedom and democracy is now largely discredited everywhere, even among a significant proportion of Americans. The fervent celebration of American ideals by Congressmen and publicists is useful mainly for bolstering up their own morale. In others, even those who want to agree, this incantation raises more and more serious doubts. Can we possibly be sincere about these grandiose concepts? Do we believe that they are likely to be used in really constructive ways to solve our problems? Or are they going to become fanatical shibboleths to justify an armed and violent reaction on the part of white society against the attacks leveled against it? In other words, is “freedom” simply going to become the copyrighted trademark of the States Rights types, the KKK, the CIA or the Pentagon? In other words, will “freedom” simply mean armed repression? What I am saying is this: our American ideals and principles can retain their credibility only insofar as they are capable of radical adaptation to this crisis, and creative response to a turbulent time that is heavy with unimagined possibilities both for growth and pathological decay. Slogans are not enough. And slogans backed up with machine guns and napalm are not inspiring much real belief! They only consolidate hatred and determined opposition. “Freedom” cannot retain its meaning if it continues to be only freedom for some based on the violent repression of others.

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[W]e have to recognize that a climate of irrationality and panic is just what extremists of both sides thrive on. If everyone is kept in a state of fear and uncertainty, if tensions are maintained at a high pitch, then explosions and reprisals can be managed by those who think they will profit by them.

Thomas Merton
From the essay The Hot Summer of Sixty-Seven in his book Faith and Violence: Christian teaching and Christian Practice
© 1968

Though this essay/chapter was about building racial tensions and violence in the summer of 1967, Merton, as usual, looked to the violence as a symptom and spent the chapter zooming out, searching out the underlying problems in the hearts of ourselves and our culture’s collective hearts. And what he found read frighteningly fresh today. Through most of the chapter, one could easily substitute Arab or Muslim for Negro*, Iraq or Afghanistan for Vietnam, and Terrorist for Communist, and keep the exact same meaning of the text. (Also, we could now easily interchange America, England and France for most of the context.)

On the one hand, I am saddened that we have not moved on from the problems of forty years ago, but instead merely shifted the targets a bit. If anything, I’ve seen it intensify the past nine years. But on the other hand, I am encouraged that we have prophetic voices like Merton that addressed these very issues forty years ago, so that we actually need to work less on finding solutions and more on getting them heard and followed.

*This is the word he most used throughout. From a 2010 perspective it sounds horrid, but I have to remember that in 1968 it held roughly the same meaning as African-American does now.

Lessons learned (so far) from tweet-fasting

Ten days ago I announced that I was dropping Twitter and Facebook for a while. It actually started ramping up (or is that down?) a few days previous, and it’s a lot more than social networking. I’ve dropped nearly all non-work browsing. My only real exceptions are email, following direct messages from email, my bank (et. al.) websites, targeted research for issues in my real life, and Google News every 2 or 3 days. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned so far in the process.

1. It takes a week for the twitch to start to decline, and I don’t yet know how long it takes to cease. It was a full seven days for the urge to constantly check my friends’ tweets and status updates, the latest news happenings, the latest petty spat between the Left and Right, the weather, anything. It was amazing how many times I had to stop urge to tweet right now what was happening right now. But after a week, it started to slow. I am starting to feel the reality that I intellectually believed: that it really doesn’t matter.
2. I was not losing as much time to the internet as I thought I was. I’ve been keeping the computer off at night for over a week, but I’ve hardly gotten any more reading done. That’s partly because we had some good friends in town as guests for a few days, but with HiveMind at WestWinds, our small group, and me keeping the house and finances partly together and us both working, I really just don’t have a lot of time. I’ve come to realize that I did all of my posting of tweets in in-between moments, the same as I read most all tweets and status updates. Now I’ve replaced them with spending an additional minute staring at the budding trees, or petting the dogs, or watching the sunset, or kissing my wife, or something else that is worth more a year from now.
3. While I don’t miss most of what goes on on social networks, I do miss hearing about my friends. I could care less about farmville or what people had for dinner (unless they are bringing me the leftovers) but I miss the stories of the pain and beauty in the big things of life. If I could turn down the chatter threshold and only get those updates, I’d probably still check in once a day or so.
4. People miss me on social networks. I figured my 2100-some tweets in under 2 years would keep people from wanting to hear about me, but I have had a few people tell me that they miss my constant comments. (And this after the twins April fools joke.) I have had someone mention that they don’t miss the political stuff, and another that they miss the political stuff, but generally people apparently wanted to hear about me. If you have read this far, I guess you do too.
5. I’m going to bed earlier. I think the reason for this is twofold. First, I am no longer trying to keep myself awake trying to catch the entire unending stream of data before it slips away. Why I ever think I can is beyond me, but I often act as if I’m about to miss everything if I log off. Second is that I don’t have a bright glowing rectangle fooling my eyes with daylight-tinted light, which in turn fools my brain that it is not night yet. I actually started down this path a few weeks previous with the (free) install of software that adjust the color temp down at night: F.lux. It was already starting to work its magic by giving me 3200K light after sundown instead of 5000K light, but just not looking at a screen is even more effective.

That’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more in the morning, but for now my bed is calling.

Why I’m dropping the short form for a while

A few days ago, I posted to Twitter (and, by proxy, Facebook) that I’m dropping off Twitter for a while. It’s been a long time coming. And the reason I’m writing now is as much to explain as to fully understand it myself.

As a matter of intellectual responsibility, every so often I try to check the state of my own mind and its ways, and make changes as needed. I can’t say as I do it often enough, nor rigorously enough, nor that I make changes well, but I do it. Recently, I’ve been checking what way the wind is blowing.