Too Early Morning Thoughts

I have heard it said that armed with the remote men aren’t interested in what is on the television but rather they click obsessively through the channels—I suppose sometimes by the dozens or the hundreds--looking for . . . well, I guess I am not exactly, wanting to know, I have heard said, what else is on television. I have settled in motel rooms and have been guilty of such practice. Actually, I find the effort dizzying and exhausting, and at some point I give up (but wholly unaware on what I am giving up) and go to a troubled sleep. I have learned in the process that there is a great deal to be viewed on the television screen, though I am not certain what the subject matters may be because I do not remain long enough on any one station to actually discover what is in fact going on. In fact, I don’t own a television in my home.

     This in preface to some thoughts I have had recently concerning my apps (short, I suppose, for applications) on my iPhone and iPad. On my iPhone I have an app for The New York Times, CNN, BBC news, and The Nation, and on my iPad in addition to those I have the app for the London Review of Books, The Jewish Review of Books, and Radical Philosophy. I am never alone and away from the world. (I do not refer here to text messages, announcements, or even actual phone calls!) And there are moments when I am clicking through these apps (along with spots for Amazon.com., Yahoo weather,; my bank account; Pandora, TuneIn Radio [with its remarkable plethora of international stations of all types] and Folk Alley; and my Health Club schedule of classes--obsessively looking for something—though I am not clear for what it is I might be searching, and I begin to feel dizzy and somewhat physically weary. Perhaps I am just bored, but I think it is more about what else there is in the world outside my immediate view.

     The internet has provided me with too many possibilities and too much information and I am growing weary looking for something about which I am not certain I have intrinsic interest. I do read an actual newspaper regularly, and there are even moments when at the hour I turn on an NPR station to ensure the continued presence of the world!  The result of all my surfing, I think, is that I never seem to exist in the present. Somehow, I am always somewhere else in search of something that would be in essence unsatisfying but that would urge me on to search somewhere else for something I know not what but which promises some satisfaction I do not experience in the present or my presence, and that I do not yet feel of any need. In such activity I am in a constant state of frustration and anticipation; I forever need a quick nap.

     I have grown annoyingly impatient. I want things immediately. I suffer my present (and my presence) unsatisfied and unsatisfying. And yet I remain addicted to my apps and my devices afraid of missing out on something—but I still don’t know what that something ever might be.

     There is an app for Find Your Phone. Is there an app for Find Yourself?