contradiction

do you ever have contradictory feelings for things (or people) in your life?

i sure do.

if you're reading this, you're probably on a computer; i certainly used a computer to write it on. but sometimes i really dislike being so tied to computers, and i long for the days when i would sit in the shade of some big tree on the Arts quad. no laptop, no cell phone (not that i have one now), no bother. just whatever book that had caught my fancy -- Michael Crichton or Stephen King or maybe even George Eliot -- probably instead of the 3rd or 4th semester Calculus i should have been studying (which is part of why i became an English major instead of staying in physics).

or the ocean. every time i go to the ocean i think about somehow arranging a little shack in the dunes (legally or illegally) and abandoning my life of computers and electronics. it's a nice dream -- one of my favorites.

if i can be creative while i'm on the computer, i like it ok; but mostly it's just a diversion. mostly i'm not doing creative stuff; mostly it's just killing time. i end up spending time on the computer instead of with people, because it's so much easier. i don't mean this as a judgement on anyone else; this is just my own personal dissatisfaction with being married to technology.

when i was seven or eight, and i got my first computer, i thought it was *great*. i suppose it appealed to the mathematical side of me -- the logic and structure -- and i had lots of fun "playing" (writing programs and getting them to run). nobody said "Careful, or you may end up spending much of you life looking at a computer screen." and i probably wouldn't have listened to them, even if they had. some days i still like computers; and some days i feel like i've sold out to the military-industrial complex

for the past couple of months, i've been doing basically all my writing on paper (instead of a compuer), and it's been a different experience. the fiction that i've been working on is mostly about a character given a chance to make some different choices in his life and in his past -- choosing to not be part of our mechanized & electrified society, for instance. it's a story i might well not have written on a computer; and now that it's getting to the point that i should transfer it to the computer (before it gets any longer), i've been hesitating. i'm almost happier with it on thirty pages of haphazard print, in pen & pencil, with lots of crossings out and emendations and changes. maybe it's better that way.

[i'll get to the contradictory-feelings about-people thing next time.]