How I didn't spend my summer vacation

If you've been in mourning for the past few weeks because you figured I was eaten by rats, fear not: I've not fallen prey to rats or fleas or vampires or anything in the complex ecosystem thriving under my floorboards. Instead I was swallowed up by the summer and a very fire-and-forget lifestyle.

For the past few months now-- summer, essentially-- I've been neglecting my blog and instead Tweeting my life away in 140-character blurbs. Every day I wake up, drive to work, and spend every moment of my downtime following Tweets about Houston restaurants, Billy Mays, fonts, social media, open education, and local drink specials.Then I throw my own two cents in to the mix. And since I'm the social media guy at work, I spend a good amount of my "uptime" perusing Twitter and Facebook. It's a job most guys would kill to have.

...except I can feel the toll it's starting to take on my personality (and my brain). I was built to do and reflect, not to do and forget. Twitter and other tools of the so-call social revolution put so much emphasis on the "now" that it's easy to forget to stop and smell the roses. Whereas I used to pause and carefully consider the implications of the respective past few days in my semi-regular blog posts, Twitter allows me only 140 characters to state the bare minimum before moving on to the next big event in my life. Or your life. So many lives, so much information.

If this blog has served any purpose in the past eight years, it's at least been a good place to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I have honestly reached the limit of how much data I can consume and regurgitate and sort in one day. I go to bed feeling like the 1997 New York Stock Exchange is trading Microsoft in my head. And for all this processing and grief, what do I have to show for it? Nothing. I retain little or nothing more than the ability to gloat about hearing news first, whatever that news may have been.

I've got to push something useless out of my head before classes start back up. Gotta make room for senior year in there, somewhere.