One and a half more days until I can step back into my online life. Like I said yesterday, if I do this again, I’ll fine-tune it to where I can exercise my self-discipline without becoming an internet hermit.

I guess it’s a lesson in how hooked I am on the instant-gratification, continuously-updated constant flow of information from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and all that. A minute ago, instead of opening tabs for Facebook and Twitter like I usually do when I turn on my computer, I opened up CNN.com. But the news hasn’t changed much since I last checked it this afternoon, so now I’m here. With nothing to say.

Yesterday I tried reading some of the featured articles on Wikipedia so that I could read SOMETHING online that wasn’t “prohibited.” I don’t remember what happened next, but I know I didn’t get very far, which is weird because you know how Wikipedia is. If you try to find one little thing for an assignment you’re working on, you’ll be there for hours. Apparently, though, if you set out TRYING to spend time on Wikipedia, nothing grabs your attention.

In other news, my foot still hurts about as much as it did yesterday. Looks like it’s sensible shoes for the rest of the week. Gotta keep this puppy fresh for Hidalgo: four shows in two days, for a total of five hours of performance time. Yowza.

Gah, I’m sure the rest of the world is talking about so many fun things in my absence. Thirty-eight more hours!

A little over halfway through, I’m feeling pretty blah about this exercise. It’s a success in the sense that I haven’t been on any of the sites I used to spend time on for the past four days, but I can’t say I’ve gotten much extra work done in the meantime. The main goal, though, is not to get more done during this week, but to strengthen my self-discipline in the future. A worthwhile goal, that, but hard to measure.

Quitting social media for a week has left me feeling disconnected and out of the loop. I’m completely cut off from my internet friends and people-I-follow, and I miss the casual chit-chat with my real-life friends, even the ones I see regularly in person.

Facebook and Twitter, for me at least, are all about being brief, witty, and shallow, and instead I find myself here on my blog, writing long, boring sentences analyzing the meaning of social media in my life. Gross.

If I do something like this again, I’m going to make it more like “only check Facebook once a day for a week.” It’s not actually interacting with people online that’s a waste of time, it’s keeping the site open and flipping over to check on it every time a new post appears.

Anyway, here are some of the things I considered posting to Facebook or Twitter today:

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Browsing the internet on my lunch break*, I noticed that I’ve been slacking on the blogging front lately. So here I am.

I took Sam to the vet this morning for a check-up and a squirt of something-something vaccine up the nose. I told the vet one of his eyes had been red off and on lately, but it hadn’t seemed to bother him too much. She took him into the back for a tear test and found out that my poor puppy is making almost no tears and has horribly dry eyes. And his cruel, cruel mother had let him suffer all this time. She didn’t say that second part out loud.

So now I have a tube of goop to squirt into his eyes once a day. I have to hold his eye open and squeeze a line of goo the consistency of Vaseline onto the surface of his eyeball. The vet techs managed to do it with two of them holding him still—I can’t wait to try it at home by myself. I can only hope he’ll understand how soothing the nice happy goop is and come running for it every morning. Hey, it could happen.

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First, comment filtering is magic with extra sparkles. Whereas previously I was faced with a queue of a hundred or so spam comments every time I logged in, since the switch a week ago I’ve had to moderate three whole comments. THREE. And two of them were from real people. (The third was an ad for online poker in French.)

By the way, I’m not sure if “approved commenter” status carried over in the switch, so you might have to wait a while to see your first comment post-update. If you’ve posted something that’s completely disappeared, email me (prepoceros at gmail).

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