January is, for me, the moodiest month of the year. The parties have all ended, the decorations have been put away, it’s still dark when you leave for work and, often, when you trudge back home, and there’s not much to look forward to in the near future. Your bank account’s still recovering from the holidays, and you’re trying to make positive changes in your life and, more often than not, remembering how hard those can be to sustain, something which you will forget again by December.
February is frequently unpleasant, too, but by then, you’re within sight of earlier sunrises and later sunsets. We could really use better celebrations in January and February.
Recently, I found myself engaged in another exhausting social media snit, arguing with a person I’ve never met, who has done me no wrong, who I disagree with — often vehemently — but whose opinion is more or less just as irrelevant as mine, a plastic soda bottle bobbing up and down in the garbage patch of social media that occupies a large footprint of the internet. The details of this snit, and the person with whom I engaged aren’t important, what was important was that I found myself awake, late at night, seething about this engagement, then, in the morning, was disappointed in myself for engaging in it at all. It represented a lot of what I’m trying to avoid with social media usage these days — moderately (but not particularly incisive) people with views that differ by degrees shredding each other for reasons neither could probably even explain with any real clarity.
So, I checked out (again). I spent a few days offline, avoiding social media, doing offline things — and I felt much better. I’ll likely never break my news junkie habits, and still spent too much time refreshing the news aggregator app’s screen reading the latest on whatever terrible news the hour brings, but, in general, I felt less personally attacked by the news, and didn’t need to offer an opinion on it. Whatever I think about what’s going on in Minneapolis, or in Venezuela, or in Greenland, there’s little I can do beyond engaging with my Congressional representation, or hitting the streets in protest, and simply hoping for the best.
Now, I’m back (again). There are things I like to share with you, and I enjoy engaging with people all over the world on a wide variety of topics they know more about than me; I enjoy witty (and sometimes dumb, and sometimes both dumb and witty) banter; I appreciate the long-running in-jokes that build within online communities and create a vocabulary incomprehensible to newcomers to that community, but one that’s easy to learn, if you’ve too much time on your hands. From a purely self-interested standpoint, it’s also virtually impossible to promote any kind of a personal creative project — a blog, or a website, or a band, or a performance — without maintaining a relatively active social media presence. It does no good to complain about this, this is the world we’ve lived in for some time and it won’t be going away any time soon.
But I’m trying to be better about how much time I spend staring into the abyss, who I engage with (and who I don’t), and keep a clear eye on what it is that I want to get out of social media, and who I want to be. I’ll fail at these tasks; I don’t have goals in mind. What I’m trying to develop and adhere to are more like the double yellow lines bisecting the highway on a dark and curvy route; I’m trying to stay in my lane for the safety of myself and everyone else simply trying to get to where they’re going.
Touching Grass at the Oregon Zoo
So, what did I do instead? Well, on Friday, we went to the Oregon Zoo.
The Oregon Zoo got its start like a lot of early American zoos — a man with a little too much money and too little sense of self-preservation started acquiring large and powerful animals and found himself overwhelmed. Richard B. Knight, a seaman-turned-pharmacist donated his menagerie of birds, monkeys, and, of course, bears, to the City of Portland in 1888, which laid the foundation for the Portland Zoo in Washington Park. There were a lot of Tiger Kings in the late 19th century in the United States.
Over the years, the Portland Zoo eventually became the Portland Zoological Gardens, then, in the 1960s, became the Oregon Zoo, one of the crown jewels of Washington Park, which also includes the Hoyt Arboretum, the Japanese Garden, the International Rose Test Garden, the World Forestry Center, and many smaller park areas, playgrounds, tennis courts, and other reasons to leave your home and join the outside world.
I enjoy the zoo, even in winter when so many of the animals are, understandably, nestled in their dens and waiting out the cold. There are still plenty of harried parents giving up and letting their children run screaming down the paths or children having meltdowns because they’re overstimulated, cold, or hungry, but, overall, it’s a low-key and enjoyable time to walk slowly through the zoo and take your time at the exhibits.
Re-entering Orbit
I’m planning on spending less time on social media, and, specifically, less time engaging with the news, and the discourse, and the discourse about the news, and the discourse about the discourse. But, most importantly, I’m trying to let petty snits go, and avoid getting into them in the first place, because it’s behavior I don’t like in myself, and what’s January for, if not for trying to change behaviors about yourself you don’t like (or at least saying you’d like to change them).
I’ve got some really exciting interviews for Work is Four Letters lined up for January and February, and hope to keep the momentum going through the end of the year, though I’ve realized that trying to publish once per week, or even twice per month, is simply more effort than I’m willing to put into it, so publishing this year will be once per month. I may work on some other ideas, as well. When I publish them, you’ll see them on social media, but for both your and my sake, we should all try to see less of each other there.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 