I hadn’t realized until recently that I have the attention span of a flea. Why didn’t I notice it? I was distracted.
As I sit at my desktop, pounding away on the keyboard what I hope will entertain anyone who reads it, I find myself drifting …a quick glance out the window to spy on the neighbors or I look to my other side where I have a hutch full of crystal wineglasses. I should keep on writing while the mojo is going…but in an insincere moment of imaginary-housewifedom, I decide the better choice is to get off my ass and take out all the crystal and hand wash them. They’re dusty and don’t have the sparkle they deserve. Mind you, they haven’t sparkled for months. I don’t use any of these glasses. I insisted I needed them as an engagement gift, you know, so I could set the table for all the fancy dinners I was planning to have.
(To those who aren’t married yet, I’m going to give you a free life lesson: You will never have those parties. I can count on both hands how many times I’ve used the crystal wine, water and champagne glasses, along with the ‘good china’ I had to have. You want the cheap stuff, the stuff you don’t care about when your husband’s idiot of a best friend drops it on the floor. Trust me on this one…and you’re welcome.)
Lately my distraction has been all about facebook. It took me forever to kick my Farmville addiction (honestly I did have one hell of a fancy farm). I’d plan my day around what time I had to pick my corn and plant roses. I made sure each farm animal wasn’t crushed in their pens…you know, like they were real breathing farm animals. I owned reindeer…how cool is that? Much unlike my real life, my farm was neat and orderly. I crossed the sanity line. I’d have long conversations with my mother (another proud farmer) over our vast farmlands and how beautifully they were decorated. It was sad, just sad.
Like I said, I finally realized that I had to stop cold turkey. And it was painful. I knew my flowers were wilting and my corn was turning brown. I wanted to look. I wanted to feed my poor hungry chickens. But I stayed strong. I stopped over a year ago and to this day, I can’t visit the ol’ farm…it’s much too painful.
When I decided to go for it and write a book, I was on a roll. I was a writing machine. Words were coming so easily… Clever, clever words. Oh, I was quite the wordsmith. That didn’t last too long. Once again, my attention span got in the way of creativity. Damn facebook again. I’d get through a paragraph then reward myself with a quick peek on my newsfeed. Little by little, the rewards were given for lesser achievements. A sentence. A word. A space.
Facebook, Twitter and various gossip websites were ruling my life and sucking out my inspiration… A complete time waster.
Hello, My name is Annette.
I’m a procrastinator and Social Mediaholic.
I thought long and hard (<—another one of my issues, immature dirty mind) about how I was going to escape my obsession and actually do what I set out to do when I powered up my desktop… Write.
I’ve deactivated my facebook page temporarily before. The trouble is, you can easily reactivate it by simply typing in your email and password. I’d accidentally (I swear that’s the truth) log back in all the time and have to deactivate it again (of course after I perused my newsfeed first)
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I called in for reinforcements. My husband. I couldn’t believe what I was about to request, but it had to be done. Here’s how it went down.
“Change my password and don’t tell me what it is.” I signed into my facebook account and handed the tablet to him.
“Seriously?” He frowns.
“Yes, I’m weak.”
“You’re not going to text me all day while I’m at work asking for it, are you?”
“No. And if I do ask for it, you can’t give it to me.”
“How will I know when you really need it back?”
“Oh, I didn’t think of that. I don’t know. You’ll have to figure it out.”
“I’m in a no win situation here, you know that.”
“Yes, now change it.”
I turned my head and poof! New password. I can no longer access facebook at will. My husband holds the key. I gave him all the power. He decides when I can go on facebook and I obey. I just made him my social media Dom. Holy crap, I’ve unintentionally entered into a D/s social media relationship. All this Fifty Shades of Grey fanfiction writing has infiltrated my real life.
I’m going to have to ponder this for a while; I think I just blew my mind.
You’d think having no facebook access would give me some relief, but what I wasn’t expecting was my paranoia to sink in. What am I missing? What if they’re talking about me? They probably are. They definitely are. What are they saying? Is it mean? Why are they saying mean things about me? You get the picture.
Come to think of it, if anyone reads this blog entry, they’ll know I can’t see my facebook page. They’re probably going to litter my facebook page with taunts, knowing I won’t have the ability to respond. There’s no way I can win this.
But I am keeping to my word, until I get a respectable amount of writing accomplished. Today, I was allowed a little facebook time. I had to look the other way when he entered the password. It was wonderful. Wonderful!
So, now I’m spoon-fed small morsels of facebook. I’m still working on my gossip site addiction (Cut me some slack, Rome wasn’t build in a day). But I’m heading in the right direction. I’ll pour myself a glass of wine (or two) and wait for the brilliance to pour out into my keyboard.
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AC Netzel 