these echoes

Lately I've been talking so much about "social media" -- spending so many hours "tweeting" and "blogging" and "Facebooking" -- that I find myself narrating everything.

"Trish hates the taste of chocolate milk gone bad."

"Trish worries about bicycle couriers when it's -40C."

Seriously. It's the grossest thing. And it starts as soon as I get up -- "Trish should learn to get up when her alarm rings, not hit the snooze button 17 times" -- and does not end until I go back to sleep at the end of the day -- "Trish got sucked into YouTube again. I heart you, Rick Mercer."

So. Is this technology's fault?

Not so much, I know. Technology is just a tool for me to be more self-centred. And I'm probably not the only one.

So I try to unplug (she says as she writes to an online audience of friends&family). And I try to turn off my brain. And I find a bizarre amount of relief in this excerpt from Happenstance*, which was written 30 years ago.

"He often wished he could shut them off, these buzzing thoughts -- why was it he could never do anything, never even think of doing something, without playing at doing it; there was something despicable in his small rehearsals and considered responses; was he the only one in the world who suffered these echoes?" (p. 155)


*BTW, TSS, I read the wife's story in Happenstance first, and am now nearly done the husband's. It looks like this was technically the wrong way to go, as the two novels were initially published separately. The Husband's Story came out in 1980 and A Fairly Conventional Woman in 1982.