Notes from Maine - 2024/12/29
The skies gave us an early Christmas present here in Maine. On the 24th we woke up to a blanket of fresh snow. Still getting over a cold, I didn’t go anywhere. My visits with family were strictly over the phone. It’s easy to lose track of the days when there are disruptions to the schedule. Trash pickup was on Tuesday. I warned the Thursday group of friends to not come over (still potentially contagious). By Friday, I had to check my phone to figure out which day it was.
Two-hundred years ago, when this house was fairly new, keeping a calendar must have been an exercise of faith. Can you imagine being snowed in for a week, staring at an X on the calendar, and wondering if you made it that morning or yesterday? It would be incredibly easy to lose or gain a day. I set reminders for everything. I don’t trust myself to remember to water the jade plant.
It’s nice to imagine that we’ve offloaded mundane mental exercises (like remembering what day it is) so that we can focus on more exciting and interesting discoveries. Don’t waste your brain power on knowing how many yards are in a mile—you can Google that. We have tools in our lives to do accurate multiplication and division so that we’re all free to spend our mental energy on more important tasks. Recently, Instagram got me. I always had the app, and I curated a feed of a dozen or so accounts that showed me pictures of pretty horses, basset hounds, and polar bears. Everything else, I ignored. When I scrolled down to a message that said, “You’ve seen all the new posts in your feed,” I would stop scrolling and close the app. Then, one day I clicked on one of those posts that wasn’t in my feed. It was a “suggested” post based on my interests or something like that. That led me to a never-ending list of suggested posts. I quickly learned that I should only linger on things that actually interested me or else the feed would get flooded with hoof-trimming videos, or weird AI sea monsters. You can’t pause on something just to figure out what it is, or Instagram will take that as a challenge and confront you with all kinds of intriguing mysteries.
I think I have to delete the app now. They got me. They know how to suck me into a vortex of vapid, colorful clickbait. I refuse to turn into one of those dopamine junkies who scrolls until their thumb aches. Who am I kidding? I’m already deep down that rabbit hole. I get a report each Sunday. Today’s report told me that I averaged more than two hours of “screen time” per day. Two hours? There has to be a mistake. Might be time to ditch that device for a while. I carry around the phone so I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts while I do chores, but honestly, it’s time to take a break from that as well. When other people are talking in my head, it’s difficult to hear the quiet thoughts.
As long as I’m making empty promises to myself while I write, I might as well add another item to the list—I’m going to memorize a bunch of phone numbers. When Mom was up recently, she showed me how she sends a text message. Instead of finding the recipient on a list, she types in the phone number. If you get it right, the phone will tell you who you’re texting, so there’s no danger of accidentally sending a message to a random stranger. But it made me realize that although I still remember the phone number of my best friend from first grade, I would be hard-pressed to dial most of my friends from memory. So, I started learning their numbers. How many phone numbers did I know when I was a kid? Dozens? It shouldn’t be that hard to lock in everyone I keep in touch with, right?
I’m afraid that if I keep typing I’m going to sign myself up for even more commitments to self-improvement. I guess this is the right time of year to make resolutions. If anyone out there tries to call me in the coming year, please don’t be offended if I don’t answer the phone. I might stop carrying it around until I can break my fascination with scrolling. I’ll be the weirdo shuffling around and mumbling random numbers as I try to memorize them.
