I took a lot of photos on this vacation. Around 400, I think, the best of which are slowly finding their way into a set on Flickr. I’m using them to reconstruct the trip in my mind, to jog my memory as to what happened when.
And yet there’s a gap. I didn’t take any photos on Monday. Not one.
What happened on that day? Without documentation, I feel bereft — naked — alone on the edge — like Andrew Bowen during Fringe month.
That last reference may seem gratuitous but it’s not. While Xy was in Fishville I bought her a new laptop, but I had an ulterior motive: I wanted a computer to bring with me on this trip. And so I did.
(It’s an Acer Aspire AS5742z-4685 LX.R4P02.020 15.6″ Notebook, Intel Pentium P6100 2.0GHz, 4GB DDR3 Memory, 320GB HDD, DVD Super Multi-Drive, Intel GMA HD, with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit which I got for $391.09, refurbished, from Cheetah Deals via Buy.com. Thanks to all the folks who gave me pointers.)
And so I was checking my e-mail and catching up with websites like Project Conversion constantly.
Looking back on Facebook, I see I shared this link: 2011 National Days of Prayer to Protect Native American Sacred Places with the comment, “Something to think about as the solstice approaches.”
More on the solstice later.
And on Twitter:
My three-year-old daughter wants to know: “Who is Weiner?” And so it begins.
I also used that laptop to compose my monthly letter to my daughter, though I didn’t publish it until the next day.
Thus, even though I didn’t take any photos, we can still trace my digital spoor, as it were.
I was going to write that the main break in my routine was that I didn’t blog during my week in Vero. But obviously I’ve already given the lie to that. In fact I posted to my blog three times during the week. Oops. I told myself that I wanted to maintain a normal online presence so people wouldn’t know I was away from the house, but that’s bogus.
All of which gives me pause to wonder about routines and habits. I’ve often observed that my life is a process of establishing routines and breaking them. Isn’t the point of a vacation to get outside one’s daily routine, the regular grind of the rat race? But I like my job and I don’t feel like a racing rat. I try to live my life such that I don’t feel I need a vacation. I have the good fortune of generally enjoying my daily routine. Much of that involves having my head caught up in the net. Is that a bad thing? Habits usually feel good on some level, but that doesn’t mean they’re good all the way through. I enjoy having a drink, but if I find myself drinking too much, I cut back. Should I have left the laptop at home?
Maybe next time.
Of course there’s no way to know whether you should’ve left the laptop at home; done is done – but, since you took it along (and used it), was it really a vacation?
Hey man,
I faced the same issue when I went on vacation with my family earlier this month. The whole man, in fact, was supposed to be a vacation from Project Conversion because of the time it takes from my family. I thought I needed a rest, a moment to step back.
All I did was miss it more. Because of this, I constantly made updates to the Facebook group. It’s my community. How can I walk away, even for a minute?
You are right in that, if we love our life, what’s the point of escaping through vacation? I think what happens then is that we adjust our lens on what a vacation is. It thus becomes an extention of that enjoyment–enjoyment out of the context of our normal bliss. One can be happy with vanilla ice cream but venture into other flavors as well without removing value from the original flavor.