Things I haven’t done during my Staycation
My Staycation officially ends tomorrow. I didn’t have all that much planned for it, but I haven’t accomplished much of Not Much. Here’s what hasn’t happened:
- Getting my LibraryThing collections up-to-date for 2016. (There’s always tomorrow to start on that, though, and once I get started on it I’ll have momentum. I think.)
- Reading books on the patio. (We have had a triple-digit heat wave this week.)
- Reading books at all, really. I’ve been reading onscreen..
What I’ve read on my Staycation instead
I’ve been following the news, reading commentary and accumulating material for future writing. I seem to in a life stage where I’m just not that good at tuning out when interesting things are happening in the world around me, and we seem to be cursed with very interesting times right now.
I’ve been following a lot of links from daily email newsletters, and maybe doing too much reading of Facebook discussion threads and links shared there. That said, there was much to talk about there this week…and most of it was talk. Argument showed up in the comment threads of things some of my friends shared, but if I didn’t go looking for it, I didn’t really encounter it. That may be because my feed has become an echo chamber, and that’s a hard thing to break open even if you try:
“(A)lgorithms, like the kind used by Facebook, often steer us toward articles that reflect our own ideological preferences and search results usually echo what we already know and like. As a result, we aren’t exposed to other ideas and viewpoints…(Y)ou can try to beat the algorithms to see the other side. Just make sure you actually want to read those opposite viewpoints, because the algorithms can tell when you don’t.”
Not necessarily the news…
In addition to the political, I’ve been reading on adult friendship and privilege, and those are both things I’d like to talk about more.
And it seems that most of the political viewpoints in my Facebook feed align pretty well with my own, the most active controversy I encountered there this week was over Kim Kardashian’s addition as a keynote speaker at this year’s BlogHer conference. (BlogHer is local to me this year, but I was not planning to go nd this would definitely not influence me to change my mind.)
Accomplishment of the Week!
All the online reading means there’s a link roundup in progress, but the best links are to some other folks’ favorite books of last books: the first edition of The Book Bridge is live here on the blog, and you should go take a look at it!
As much as I want to read during “staycations,” I usually end up binge-watching Criminal Minds or other shows on Netflix. Reading doesn’t really happen.
I’ve been off Twitter for the last couple of weeks because of the two conventions, but I’m still following the going-ons via Facebook, although to be honest most of my friends aren’t commenting. At least, the ones that I’m following, I should say.
I was really tempted to email my boss to ask for a couple more days off, but I doubt I would have spent that time reading either, based on prior experience. (And I was being tempted by Netflix too–I’ve been wanting to do a rewatch of The West Wing.)