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Day Three Hundred and Fifty:  Just sitting together and texting.

Years ago, when I was in ninth grade and just got a phone, during the summer time Ceara and I went to the beach with our families and I wanted to text a boy but felt bad because I was with her and we both decided not to text while we were together and focus on eachother.  Through the years, after countless sleepovers over coke and eventually wine, we casually texted other people, but this evening we sat on my bed not talking and focused on our phones.  We laugh about it, and that’s something that has changed in most relationships I think.  Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction says that she wants to be with someone who she can sit with and say nothing and be omfortable.  That is what I want, but I have a feeling Ceara and I’s relationship has reached the level of texting and sitting in eachother’s company and being fine with it all, comfortable.

Fifteen years seriously changes a relationship, doesn’t it?  God, best friends are great.

But I’ve been irkied off about technology lately.  My phone has been freezing, my computer restarting on its own, and the amount that it frustrates me honestly scares me.  I rely on my ipod, my phone, my computer, my ipad so much that it worries me.  We all rely on our technology to such an extent that they become a part of us.  We decorate our phones to match us and our personalities, we protect our privacy on these machines to the death, and we carry them around with us like our own intentional puppies.  This technology scares me because it has become a part of our live as much as belts or hair ties have:  the accessories of the ages.

And sometimes it isn’t so bad, I mean, technology gives so many people access to so many things, puts people in communities that they otherwise wouldn’t, but what is so fascinating is that no one has a problem with the fact that they are becoming an actual part of ourselves.  I feel naked going anywhere without my phone, how warped is that?  I would feel weird without writing this blog and seeing it posted to my twitter account, and I would definitely cringe at the thought of missing someone’s birthday on Facebook (for the most part).  What is it about this medium that has caught hold of us?  It’s like a friggen infection.  And we aren’t trying to cure it for the most part.

I challenge anyone reading this to take an entire day away from the internet, their cellphones, and try to take some time away from social media and being constantly connected to everyone.  I haven’t decided what day I will be doing it, but I will be doing it sometime over the break, and it will probably be scary, but for the most part I believe it will be liberating.  We do it when we go on vacation and lay on the beach for a week, why can’t we do it while we are on holiday?

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