I want to take a break from FB & Instagram (& Twitter?). Starting next year, tomorrow, I will not be a FaceBook presence. I want to be less present in all my digital social media. I really want to be looking at my iPhone less. However, I like to hear what others are thinking, saying, seeing, and doing. Strangely, I do consider my FB friends, “friends.” So what I hear of you, whether the LaGuardia student from years ago, friends from Copley Square HS, the decade I spent at Hunter College and my California Graduate School sojourn, I really do want to hear what you’re up to. But I can’t seem to keep this “right sized:” I look too often, and I don’t think I can rein it in any other way than taking a hiatus from Facebook.
I find the process of being a Facebook Citizen (which is to say digital citizen: Twitter, Instagram and Twitpics all belong here) fragmenting. I think my mania with haiku is a perfect sign of it.
Haiku are poems/
In A.D.H.D. Format:/
Quickly completed/
#haiku
In this digital format I get the germ of the poems and ideas down but I never return to savor the thoughts as long as the desire to check and publish so instantly. (HMMMM, I think I just talked myself out of keeping twitter, which I was hoping to just post with, along with my blogs todayeye and wqueens7 [which publish on FB].)
Instead of immediately posting everything I think I would like to write on paper and think about what I’ve written a bit longer before I share them with the world.
The other thing is that I want to spend more time looking at books and the world. I realize that I have probably spent an entire day or more waiting for things to load while I was trying to see how you were doing, where you were, or what you saw (your pictures, poems and check-ins [Foursquare is another one to drop!]). I walked into a room over the holidays and I was confronted with a number of people looking down at their phones, some were still talking to the people closest to them, but I was struck by the oracular nature of the smartphones. People were looking into them like Narcissus into the pond.
So I think I will try to spend the first weeks of the year off of Facebook and Instigram and Twitter and post on my blog when I really need to say something. This is just my first cry for help, let’s see how it works.
-Finally, I want to spend less time looking at my phone, even though you are hidden in the digital folds and I AM INTERESTED in you.
-I want to spend less time trying to capture my moments in haiku to share with you instantly, you’ll do fine without my constant barrage of “poems.”[1]
-I want to hear from people in a more personal form. So I will be trying to write more letters and postcards to those of you whom I do contact. The act of sitting down with paper and pen pleases me to no end. You are worth it. I would love to get a letter from you. You can write me at work if you don’t know my postal address:
Stafford Gregoire
LaGuardia Community College
31-10 Thomson Ave., E103
Long Island City, N.Y.
11101
[1] I still don’t consider haiku “real” poems. I like their efficiency, but they don’t rise to the level of Emily Dickinson and Theodore Geisel.









