There are simply too many things vying for my attention.
Plus I am trying so hard to spend more time living my life – rather than looking at it – and between this blog, emails, Facebook and Twitter, well, really…it’s daunting darhling, daunting…
Pinterest is like addictive eye-candy, and given that I’m already a magazine junkie, I saw quickly that Pinterest took the magazine hook to a whole new level.
That is, it doesn’t even bother with text at all. I mean really, it’s what Kevin has been saying to me all along about my house and home magazines, “You only look at the pictures.”
Well, yes, but I do read the stories too, though they’re quite formulaic. Truth is, J’adore the shiny pictures. They inspire me. And on those days when I have to take my huge stacks of home magazines to the thrift store, I am usually quivering at letting them go (what if there’s the perfect idea for Something in that pile, the very thing that I don’t even know I need to do yet?)
Which is why I quit going on Pinterest. It was sucking up so much time, my synapses were on sensory overload and I kept thinking, OH! I can do that, or make that or paint that, or, or, or….
And so. I went cold turkey. I get occasional e-mails telling me someone is following me on Pinterest. If it’s you, I apologise right now for wasting your time.
I haven’t closed the account. I know I’ll go dip into it now and again, but for now? I’m just saying NO.
Which brings me to the photos from yesterday. We drove to the little city of Uzes, buzzing down roads like these.
I can’t seem to get enough of these plane trees that dapple these streets. There is a reason the painters flocked to these areas. The shadows are like crayon outlines. There are no murky, blurred edges. Simply clean dark shadows. Stunning stuff.
In Uzes, we went to the church with the bell tower from the 12th century. Of course. Kind of a recent addition I guess.
And inside, we saw colours like this, a stained glass of the woman I’m rather fond of; the original Madonna.
Really. I don’t think I need to look at Pinterest.
It’s all right here in front of me.
re: “on those days when I have to take my huge stacks of home magazines to the thrift store, I am usually quivering at letting them go (what if there’s the perfect idea for Something in that pile, the very thing that I don’t even know I need to do yet?)” / C.F.
For years I kept boxes of National Geographic mags for the very ‘eventual’ purpose you mention.
I had even rescued dozens of these from recycling dumpsters! What kind of person would just
‘throw away’ N-Geo magazines?
I was going to make the most interesting collages ever imagined.
Alas, it was not to be.
It was with great hesitation I took the whole lot of them to the Sally Ann, where they joined
their ilk to sit on shelves waiting for the next great collager (is that a verb?) to arrive.
Exactemente, Claude. It’s the huge ‘what-if?’ question that keeps us surrounded by our stuff. What if one day this particular pair of pants fits again, or what if I suddenly want to make star-shaped cookies, even though I’ve never once used that cookie cutter. Indeed. I am rooting out this tendency as much as I can. There is freedom on the other side of all that ‘what-if-stuff’ 🙂
Interesting post. The jury is still out for me in Pinterest (funny, I should go find a pic of a jury and pin it, eh?). If I remember the intention of Pinterest, which is really to be a visual bookmarking system for things I want to come back to later or re-share at a later date in a different context, it works very well. But there’s nothing more annoying, pointless and schadenfreud-inducing then searching for say, George Takei’s (http://pinterest.com/search/?q=george+takei), and seeing the sheer volume of repetitive images. Who needs to be a nanobot echo? I imagine super-popular pinners creating the effect of an endless radio signal bouncing out into the universe ad infinitum. It was bad enough before wondering what an alien race would think of our species if it tapped into a stream from the 70’s… I fear an ever-escalating rise of vapidity that should have us all pausing before pinning.
So, well-curated content (I would love to be able to look at all your france images on one board) has its place!
ps. when we went to a small village outside of Montelimar to see an old Monastery (overlooking nuclear power plants, alarmingly, right at the time the reactors failed in Japan; we sat on the train for half a day with two Americans who worked for the French nuclear conglomerate – tres interesting, but I digress) Diane stepped into this ancient monastic space, held her hands out a la Indian meditation style and moaned a lamenting prayer to the parking gods of France for an unforgettable irreverent moment eau extraordinaire… and we never lacked for a parking spot for the rest of the trip.
Thanks for all the beautiful pictures, they are taking me back.
Ah oui Laurie (said with proper French emphasis on your name, I believe I just made a short poem), you’re on it! I can see the value of making one whole board with just my France photos. That’s a good point. I think it has wonderful value, but I think it’s me that’s the problem.
I get sucked into the glorious landscape of ImageLand and bam! hours fly by and what have I done but stuffed my head with images that, the second I stop, I can not begin to describe or remember?
Perhaps I somehow need to do a board but whilst wearing blinders to prevent me from roaming into other places??
I’m looking forward to all the different villages, though yes, the nuclear power plants definitely don’t figure into one’s usual romantic visual of France (I remember that in the Loire Valley…gorgeous chateaux with alien nuclear reactors a la Silkwood in the background).
I will continue to post photos in my blog and will think about doing a France Pinterest album, but only because it’s you that planted the possibility in my head 🙂
Au revoir…
Recently, at a workshop put on by The Writers’ Union of Canada about the ins and outs of being one’s own publicist (even if published), one of the presenters was raving to get us on to Pinterest. I took a look and had the feeling you’ve described, that it might be more time-sucking than really useful in terms of making connections (not that it’s all about connections, but you know what I mean, in the context she was describing). Kudos to you for paring back. — That endless tension between living our lives and looking at it, a good way of putting it! — I enjoy FB but also find myself having to take “fasts” from it, as a kind of restoration of the self. — Anyways, love the photos! Those tree-lined roads, wow. For now you get to live it, I have to just look, boo hoo.
Hi Dora. Yes, the latest thing I’ve been seeing is to do a ‘phlog’; essentially a photo log because apparently we all have such short attention spans that all we take in is images and the words just get in the way.
I understand that though Tumblr & Instagram already exists, so why we now need to phlog is kind of redundant. It is fun that these technologies help us showcase some great photos (though I’m avoiding all of those things too 🙂
However, I also find it a little sad.
There needs to be time spent on the long process of reading long chunks of text (aka A BOOK), or like you said, abstain completely from all this constant need to be stimulated.
I vote for big chunks of nothing in between all of this cyber-life. Just nada. Big deep breaths and space to quiet the monkey mind that is always looking and grabbing for the next bright shiny thing.
In fact, I’m going for my 30-minute meditation right now. I bid thee adieu…
We can gobble pictures just like we gobble food–in a daze, without really thinking. Good for you to take control of the situation.
That’s it Carol, kind of like gorging on images, which can be so easy to do. But after awhile I start to wonder why exactly am I doing this?