Back when blogging was the thing, I came across a cartoon that showed a man and a woman on a dinner date. One of them, in their thought bubble, said to the other: "I am mentally blogging you."
The behavior carries over to the present, even though blogging is no longer what it used to be. I attended a Justice concert in Osaka with a nagging thought that robbed me of a moment's total enjoyment: Nah, this won't look cool on Instagram.
But it's not technology to blame, neither the impulse to show of — share in real-time that removes us from real time. I suspect, at least in my case, that it's the proclivity for making an event out of small things.
Say this very act of blogging. A while ago (three paragraphs ago) blogging was the distraction. Now, something is distracting me from blogging. A topic popped in my head, but instead of going straight to the computer or grabbing pen and paper, I had to brew coffee first. Because who writes without coffee within reach?
Preparation becomes delay. My version of waiting for the perfect condition before taking action. How many ideas have I lost because I had to be in a certain headspace before jotting them down.
Am I contradicting my love for everyday elegance and the luxury of the slow? No. Dressing up, spending an hour or two savoring brunch with carefully chosen tableware — these are not events that I had to organize and manage. These are routine.
And that is what I need to remember. I need to turn personally valuable acts into habits. Like reading. From being a reader of books, I have devolved into someone who will eventually find the time and place with good lighting, temperature, and white noise to dive into a handsome paperback.
Old me simply read. An end in itself.
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New chapter in 2023, post-pandemic: Being a senior high teacher is forcing me to be a reader again. I want my students to feel how I felt when I was going through my literature subjects' required readings: a combination of fun and suffering.
So I find myself in bookstores again, treasure-hunting.
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| Love how it fits and feels in my hand |
It's great that publishers always reprint classics. I am happy to have cheaper — but still pretty (very important) — editions. Bought this one this afternoon for 49 pesos. You can be skeptical about the quality of translation and editing, but I appreciate its size so much and it did get me into rereading a piece of literature I've always wanted to revisit.
Let this entire book-buying blog-entry event be a symbol and a start of meaningful routines in reading, writing, and teaching.
