A Healer’s Geste

simplify

Quiet naptime. Ahhh.

I’ve finally done what I’ve been telling myself to do for quite some time. The computer is almost always on and fairly handy for “just checking.” I “just check” my email and bloglines throughout the day. I don’t receive interesting things every hour or anything, but I just like to check. I do read my emails or friends’ posts often within the hour they sent it. It’s a little pathetic. I have carried on conversations by email with a couple friends, my mom, and Matt before…wherein we’ve gone back and forth by email 5 or 6 times in an hour or two. I don’t need instant messaging. Matt and I don’t talk on the phone when we are apart and need to communicate, we email — ever since we were 16. :)

This past spring I was on a homeschool-research kick. I wanted to know what people out there actually did, I wanted to know what was out there, I spent way too much time on Google. During that time I not only read quite a few blogs of people I didn’t know, I subscribed to almost 10 of them and read their posts, like those of my friends and family, as soon as they were posted. Eventually the blogs turned out to not be as interesting or useful as first impression had, but I think I only pared it down to 7 or 8. I had also subscribed to blogs of people I used to know and even occasionally checked up on the Xanga blogs of some of my middle-school lit students. Turns out they didn’t post about Song of Roland or Faerie Queene, so I soon discontinued that habit. In the homeschooling kick I also found gobs of classical-homeschool yahoo email groups. I subscribed to a bunch, choosing to only get 1 email digest a day from each one. I have almost never read any of those emails.

So, there is routinely new messages in my email inbox, but almost never anything I actually read. There are frequently new posts in my bloglines (maybe an average of 10 a day), and most of those I read. Many of them are a waste of time and serve only to draw me in to sitting at the computer and ignoring my children. When your three-year-old peers into the office from the hallway, you turn to look at him, and he says, “You stay on the computer, Mommy!” and runs back towards the living room, you realize that perhaps you are not in a good place.

So, finally, today I cut my bloglines subscriptions from 36 to 20, cutting out most former acquaintances and total strangers and keeping only my family and friends (who don’t post too frequently, anyway) and a couple encouraging sites that have been helpful (Preschoolers & Peace and Amy’s Humble Musings). I only kept 1 blog of a stranger on my subscriptions, a reformed mama with four girls four and under (one is adopted) who has a beautiful attitude and great insights who is a joy to read.

I also unsubscribed to all but one (freecycles) of my 19 yahoo groups.

Ah. I feel less cluttered already.