I've been trying very hard recently to work on things-- to finish my myriad ongoing writing projects, to get my reading done for seminar on Thursday, etc. However, all this has been complicated by the internet, which provides an endless stream of procrastination-friendly activities. It adds fuel to a fire that doesn't need any more encouraging.
Most frustrating of all, I find that all this procrastination has stunted my attention span (yes... just like all those articles I've read for the past few years said it would), and I do not know how to strike a proper balance between online time and off-line time. And while some would say that this balance should not be so difficult to achieve-- and I would typically agree-- my being overseas means that the internet stands as my only form of communication with those back in the States, which in turn means I spend a lot of time on it in order to "stay in the loop."
It doesn't help either that I find myself also churning out posts for FLP, which invariably has also made it hard to focus. Blogs don't produce good writing. They just don't. Short, snappy sentences like those preceding this one would have never come from my fingers just six months ago. I've found I write more in fragments that I used to do, and I've also lost much of my syntactic variety and the ability to string my thoughts together with any sense of elegance. I need to get back in the saddle, I need to write paragraphs longer than three or four sentences, and I need to forget for a time that fragments exist. I need to reclaim my brain from the internet's quick attention-fixes.
My life needs to be more than 140 characters long.
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