OMG the passwords, usernames, and e-mail addresses have crowded out most of what was left of my decrepit brain and there is no end in sight. Post-It notes are stuck to everything I own at home, work, my car, my purse....
I have just spent the last two hours trying to locate this blog I started in 2008, and which I relocated last spring, after several hours of trying to relocate it then.
The upshot is I get no posting done. Who has time for this crap?
And how about those updates? The appear in your App Store and lay in wait until you can't get something to work. That's when, surprise!, you discover 42 updates for every dumb thing you ever dumbly decided to download. So you update them all which takes all day, which might as well be a year later, because by then, you've totally forgotten what you were trying to do in the first place sort of like I'm forgetting my train of thought in this blog....
I need a personal organizer who will sit in the back seat of the car and quietly keep track of everything without expecting anything in return.
I just received word that I have not cashed a certain check issued to me in May which I don't recall ever getting.
I just finished reading a recent Pulitzer Prize winning book called "The Shallows: What the Internet Is doing to Our Brains," written an old guy like me whose name I've forgotten, but who seems to be a kindred soul in this regard.
To summarize, he pretty much says what we all know, which is that the constant flitting around from window to window on the computer screen, and among the various modes of communication--e-mail to Facebook to Twitter to text messages, to Google News, Pinterest, and Stumble Upon blah, blah, blah, have become things we're stumbling upon, pretty much destroying our attention spans and obliterating our ability to do any deep thinking, or the kind of reflection that allows us to order ourselves and our world into any sort of meaningful product, such as art or writing or scientific discovery.
The guy had to go on retreat and completely UNPLUG himself from everything in order to get his book written. Well, he deserves a prize just for finishing the daggone thing, in my book. Pun intended.
Maybe I exaggerate. Maybe he does. As I say we are both in our mid-50s, sort of stuck between the people who've spent most of their lives WITHOUT computers vs. the people who've spent their whole lives WITH computers.
Us 50-somethings are still in the workplace where we simply must stay on top of this stuff even as we feeling like we're being suffocated by it all.
I don't know, I think I'll go unplug for awhile.
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