Quodlibets

Attention span

I've seen a lot of chatter on the Internet lately about how the Internet is killing "my attention span and now I can't read books!"  Something about jumping from Facebook to an RSS reader to a newspaper's website to Twitter and now back to Facebook and the reader and now I'm being IM'd and now someone is texting me and back to Facebook...and so on and so forth...is killing our ability to read books.  

Except that this isn't happening to me.  Sure, if I'm not into a book it's easy to turn to the computer for some entertainment (What's in my feed right now?  Is anyone saying anything worth reading on Twitter or Facebook?), but when I'm into a book, I'm into a book.  If a book is gripping, and any kind of book can be gripping (for instance, I couldn't put The Lost Dogs by Jim Gorant down, and that was non-fiction; yet Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson was dry and pretty much lame), why would you want to put it down to check Facebook or Twitter?  Maybe I'm naive, but I can't imagine the pull of the Internet trumping the book.

Then again, sometimes I think people pick books that aren't gripping.  Maybe some people like struggling with their reading, and I think sometimes people feel like they "should" read a certain book (Freedom comes to mind--have already heard from two friends that they had to struggle through it).  So perhaps it's hard to resist the lure of the Internet when you're not engrossed in the book you're working through.  But then why are you reading it?  I guess that's my ultimate question: if you're not enjoying the book you're reading (and if you want to put a book down--if you're actively avoiding reading it by loafing on the Internet--then you're probably not loving it, eh?) then why are you reading it?

Yesterday, a blog I like very much had a thread about which books are so bad they never should have been published, and it just....I can't comment.  Because yes, I thought the Da Vinci Code was bad.  I didn't enjoy it.  I hated the last Twilight book so hard that I believe I screamed at it and threw it across the room.  But at the same time, the only book that Sam has managed to finish since we've been together is the Da Vinci Code.  That means something to me.  It seems to me that a lot of this is about taste.  I don't like Faulkner, but I love Hemingway, and something tells me there are many people who feel exactly the opposite.  I don't like Dan Brown, but I do like Nora Roberts (and romance novels in general) and I know PLENTY of people who will jump on me for liking romance.  But look, I like them.  I'm not saying you have to, but I enjoy them.  I ENJOY THEM.  Me, the person reading them.  And frankly, if romance books are the only books you read, that's a-okay by me (shout out to my grandma!).  You're reading.  Reading is important; I'm not so sure that what you read is important, if you're doing it as a leisure activity.  I hate judging people's choice in books.  I hate it.  Reading is important.  Whatever gets you to read is worth it.  I can't be moved on this issue.

So back to the distraction thing: I do truly believe that if people read what moved them, what entertained them, what made them happy--they wouldn't be moaning about the Internet and how it's ruined their ability to read.  But that's me, and I'm an avid, passionate reader.  Maybe there's a whole lot of people who are so neutral about it that no book can tear them away from their computer.  But then, I guess that's not the fault of the Internet, is it?

New Year, Resolved

No dieting.  No assigning of moral value to foods.  No self-flagellation for food choices made in the service of my body and mind.

And of course, to love myself.

I keep talking about these things, because I keep thinking about these things.  I am battered every day with commercials for weight-loss, with people talking about their New Year's Diets, with people beating themselves up for eating a donut or a piece of cinnamon bread or coffee cake.  My boss' daughter tried to enlist me in some sort of thing she's doing--by stopping her mother from drinking soda.  This woman tried to get me to yell at my boss if I saw my boss drinking a soda.  My boss is an adult; she must make her own choices, and those choices aren't invalid if they include drinking a soda.  I know this daughter wants her mother to stop drinking soda because her mother is fat.  I know it because her mother, who is my boss, told me.  I felt dirty even being asked; I told this daughter: Your mother is an adult.  She can make her own choices.  You cannot make your mother stop drinking soda by yelling at her.  If your mother wants a soda, she should drink a soda.

I do not think that this daughter understood.

I find that I want to stop everyone from what I believe is self-harm.  "Stop!" I want to yell at them.  "Eat what you want when you want.  Your body will figure it out, and your mind will follow.  Stop disciplining yourself over what you eat.  Stop!"

It's obviously a radical idea.

It hasn't gotten easy, so much as habit.  It's still hard, sometimes, to not yell at myself for that __________  I just ate because I should have eaten _________ instead.  Fill in the blanks; I am sure you have a sentence like this somewhere inside you.  But mostly, I find myself eating.  Simply eating.  No guilt.  No associations.  No thought of points or calories or if it was making me fatter.  It's nice to find that you have cravings for bean salad one day, and cookies and cream ice cream the next, followed fast by a craving for celery draped in peanut butter.  I believe my body is telling me things with my cravings, and if I allow myself the liberty of fulfilling them (to the best of my ability--what with cost and availability), they don't consume me.  I consume them.  And they leave me alone. 

It's very hard to explain the peace of living like this, when in the past, I'd been obsessed with food for nearly 24 hours a day.  Always thinking of foods I "couldn't" eat or what I was going to eat or how I was going to kill the empty ache in my stomach.  That doesn't so much happen anymore.

The war, for me, has moved to that last resolution, and it is, I truly believe, the hardest and most radical part of these resolutions: loving yourself.  I cannot lie; I believe I work harder on my relationship with myself than I do on my relationship with Sam.  Careful reading here:  I am not saying that I don't work on my relationship with Sam.  I'm only saying that there is a LOT of internal work going on around here too.  The thing is, it's so very easy to love Sam.  He's my favorite thing, and I love so damn much about him, it's not hard to maintain that. 

Loving myself, though, is just about the hardest thing I've ever really tried to do.  No more loving parts of myself but not all of me.  No more disgust when I look in mirrors, and still, plenty of looking in mirrors.  Jesus God, it is hard.  I am so fucking good at insulting myself, both out loud and in my head.  It is very hard to not think "You look ugly" when I see myself in the mirror.  I still forget to not insult my hair after I finish drying it.  I still look at my outfit and say "This is bad."  I'm working on it.  I'm really working on it.  It's going to be really hard to love myself if I keep insulting myself.

I'm not saying these things to get a reaction.  I believe there are lots of women who do the same thing, who say the same things to themselves (even if not out loud), and I believe a lot of them won't admit it, or don't even realize they're doing it, because it feels so normal.  I'd been doing this intuitive eating thing for a long time before I realized it was going to be really hard to keep it up if I didn't stop hating myself.  I didn't figure it out alone; I read a book called "When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies" and it really made sense to me.  Parts of it, anyway.  The parts that want me to stop hating my body.  I want that too, now.  I want to stop.  I don't think I really understood how goddamn hard it was going to be.  I guess I've been doing this whole hatred thing for what?  Sixteen years?  Something like that.  It's a really hard thing to stop doing.  It was hard to even realize I was doing it.  So it ain't happening overnight, is what I'm saying.  But that's my biggest resolution for the year.

It's time to stop hating myself and really.  I mean really.  LOVE myself.  Every bit, from my brown eyes to my squishy belly.  All of it.  I'm committed to it.