Kicking

Adjustments are ongoing. Today, I threw a post for my Gazette blog to Facebook and responded to a comment on that post, but I managed to stay away otherwise. No attempts at being clever or weird or deep. No thinly-veiled pleas for help. No useless and pointless profile searches, looking for a conversation.

It's not as easy as it sounds. I'd gotten into a habit.

It's weird. Over the past year or so, I've gotten used to having a dozen or more e-mails each day from lots of people, following comments back and forth and now... there are none. It's eerie, but I remember back when I didn't have e-mail or back when I only had a work address --and in some ways that's what I'm trying to do: step back toward.

Less = more.

I will not speak ill of the people who've "friended" me or the people I reached out to through Facebook. I really had the best of intentions. I thought that this would be the mechanism that would put me back in touch with every person I ever missed --and there are a lot --the waitresses I worked with when I was 17 and 18, the guys I hung out with in high school and college, the family I've neglected year after year or avoided because of the turns my life have taken... lots of people.

But what I really wanted, an actual connection, and what the service could provide, a shadow of relation, turned out to be different.

The Facebook thing, I think, is a symptom of a larger change going on with me. Self-improvement begins with caring about the self --and I really haven't. I've mired myself in obligations, responsibilities and a long list of reasonable exceptions to the basic rule --you've got to take care of yourself.

So, I'm taking care of me. That's what this is about. I deserve better than to be haunted by electronic ghosts and I deserve better than to be one.