Dammit. I waited until the end of the night to begin this project and now I have to pull myself out of this half slumber. At least my stomach is stuffed with Fat Burger… it was an unhealthy, albeit satisfying amount for me to consume.. no wonder I am having a hard time keeping my eyes open right now… I have to get to bed soon…

I was thrown off today and that’s what I want to talk about for a little bit here.. I reached a peak state of energy this morning, stoked for the day and eager to embrace the challenges ahead.. it was a simple miscalculation on my part but something that I plan to have a remedy for before long. You see, I’m thinking off ditching my mobile phone… my email… and basically most forms of social media. Crazy? Yeah, probably. I mean, I don’t plan to drop the services completely, but there is this level of toxicity that arises from what we have worked to create… we have built a system where we allow ourselves to be contacted at any moment … from a variety of different possible angles… it is ok if you are one of the few that has a grasp and true control over your notifications and you recognize the inherent addictive nature of the social media game and know how to limit your consumption.. it was just one itty bitty text from a person that I value in my life (no, not Mari in case you were wondering)… this person means a lot to me… and I seek to gain their approval because, well, I don’t really know why.. call it an evolutionary trait or just the fact that I value the opinion of this person very deeply. All it took was a simple text to derail my mood.. to take me off the hinges… and I became glued to the process of developing a response that equated to shouting back with as much maturity (not much) as I could muster.

I failed. I failed hard. I failed so hard that I recognized that I couldn’t even respond. I had to unplug completely and just let the text go, which was not ideal. I want to work to be in the position where I can express myself with less emotion when I feel myself get rattled. But, again, the takeaway here is that had I picked up my moleskin and just committed myself to going to a local library to dig into books and work on planning for future travel adventures and blogging development, I would never have seen the text until the end of the day… I would have gone the entire day without seeing the text and I would have been able to return home and consciously given myself permission to get lost in a few text messages and/or respond to voicemails that might have accumulated during the day.. making the choice.. utilizing time blocking. I’m not saying that I am any better than the people that are trying to reach me. I am just saying that I think we could all benefit from taking control back from the devices that enslave us instead of striving to find new, cooler ways of being disrupted from the tasks at hand. I would have still been upset about the text that I received, to be sure, but I would have been in the position where it wouldn’t defeat the level of productivity in my day that I was so desperately craving and looking forward to ever since I popped out of bed at 4AM this morning. Damn that was early.