christ666's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart. What jailor so inexorable as one's self. I can't remember the last time I wrote an actual letter for correspondence purposes. I mean, I've written a couple love letters to Star as an act of impish romance, but I don't recall a recent moment where I hand wrote a letter with all the little hand cramps you get from a couple pages worth of words. Everything is sent via text, email, or instant message. We have these technologies to keep close all the people that you've traveled far from, but yet we travel so far so we don't have to be in contact with all that we left behind. Before, people crossed a threshold of emotional maturity, subjecting themselves to pain and heartache so that they can begin their lives anew with their new adoptive adult identity. Now, you graduate from high school, and you follow everyone on myspace and facebook. Does the internet and SMS services rob us of that maturity boost? Are we forever birds chained to the nest of our youths? I dream a lot of going back to school. And not just some random and generalized center of academics, but specifically high school. Almost as if I have deep regret for not doing things differently. Have I grown up into something I don't want to be? This psychological realization is something that I hadn't expected, and the haunting blandness of depersonalization can be so very defeating. Perhaps I never did mature. My biggest regret is taking advantage of all the free information and education that was thrown at your feet. I would have studied my viola more prominantly, becoming more dexterous with the slide of my bow or the pulse of my fingers on the fingerboard. I miss acidic and sour smell of freshly ground rosin on the horsehairs that tensed itself to a band from the frog. I miss the overwhelming potpourri of noisy plucking and tuning from the strings of the instruments in orchestra. I miss being a part of something, I suppose. I'm part of a new family composed of Star and her children, and I'm forever grateful to be a part of that. I guess I just miss making art with people. The days pass with minimal thoughts about my grandmother. I think about her offhandedly, feel that quick sigh of grief, and then continue whatever it was I was doing. I wanted to record all of the explicit details of her final days in this diary, but I couldn't convince myself of one worthy purpose. To have people feel sorry for me? To remind myself as if I would forget? It's best left vaulted in the corner of my memories as something that I don't want to revisit. I want to have my own stories to tell that aren't plastered on the pages of the internet. And we circle back to the idea of a paperless society. I mused on this at work when I thought about the charting system for patient health records becoming entirely electronic. We move ever so closely to forgetting paper all together, and leaving everything to the memory of a hard drive. To me, something does seem severely impersonal about this. When you go through the history of a patient, doesn't it connect with you more strongly when you write it out as it's being said as opposed to typing keys and hitting 'enter'? Don't we learn to remember by scribing down our information, and connecting to the sick by personalizing with them about their health? And what does it say about our concern with patient care when we rely on an insecure system that could crash or be hacked into without the slightest bit of difficulty. Our hard "paper" copies would be long gone and we have nothing to recover from. Does it send the message that we don't care enough about the sensitivity of privacy because we won't create a failsafe from losing that valuable information, or having it end up in the wrong hands? Did @yahoo, or @hotmail take away the sentiment in the pen? I write my thoughts in a notebook more so than I do in this diary, and I feel satisfaction in that. Of course, I contribute to my own hypocrisy of staying in touch with those you moved away from. I'm being a complete hypocrite right now as I write this entry. I write in an online diary which is capable of being read by anyone with the internet, but isn't the point of a diary to record your thoughts in secret of others? Transient guests are we. 6:12 a.m. - 2009-07-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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