There is some kind of disconnect going on in this here world.
On the one hand, we don’t have time for anything. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say “I’ve been going since [insert early time] this morning and haven’t even had time to eat,” then I would have more than enough money to buy those personalized Nike kicks that I have been secretly wanting since I was five years old. Bright blue – with some kind of neon, too. The problem is that I spend too much money on my weekly grocery bill of popcorn, grapes and Coke Zero, so when it comes down to it — I can’t afford them. Cry for me, fellow students. You know the struggle.
Shoes or no shoes, I find that I have to purposefully make time to see people – even my roommates. For the number of times I talk about them in my articles, you, my dear reader(s), probably think that we hang out all the time. False. I didn’t see my roommates for three straight days this past week. And when I did see them, one was studying for her midterm, the other was passed out on the couch because she had just finished her midterm and the last one was getting ready to leave to study for her next midterm. Midterms suck, right? Praise Him they are almost over and I will be able to clean my room without feeling guilty that I should be, like, I don’t know, reviewing formulas for biochemistry or something. If you don’t study: I hate you.
Let us back up again. We do not have time, right? We can barely fit in all our commitments and class and work and yadda yadda yadda. We don’t have time for a friend’s birthday dinner and we backed out of yoga with the other friend and we skipped small group and we don’t have time for even a simple cup of coffee with our roommate.
And yet, we somehow have time to post on each other’s walls things like (and I stole these directly from the good old Book of Faces):
“Come back into my life!”
“You are all sorts of perfect.”
“Like, where are you? Let’s be friends, okay cool.”
Guess who wrote these? I did. I had the time to log on to my Facebook, scroll through my feed, find friends, and write on their walls. And yet somehow I don’t have the time for other things like, I don’t know, spending time with that person that I apparently want to “come back into my life.”
This, dear friends, is the disconnect. We have the time to display all sorts of public affection but we don’t have time to actually substantiate our relationships. We have the time to stalk through pictures of a birthday dinner or a spontaneous hike or a beach jam session but we don’t have time to actually go to those things. Granted, it takes a lot less effort to just scroll our fat fingers up and down than to actually get up out of our comfort and move. But maybe that’s just it. It’s not the time, it’s the effort.
I’m not advocating for spreading our efforts everywhere. That would just be exhausting and counterproductive and make you question what you are doing with your life when it comes to the end of the day and you are laying in bed with the window open because it’s been hotter than the heart of a volcano recently and you look at your planner and despair that You. Just. Don’t. Have. Time.
Newsflash: You do have time. What you don’t have is effort. And so we result to posting gushy phrases on each other’s walls or Instagrams or whatever other social medial site (Yik Yak anyone?) that has so graciously permitted us this additional degree of separation from each other. We engage in Facebook Friend PDA, but do not engage in real conversation and real interaction.
Let’s get real … next week. Because I don’t have time to finish this conversation with you all. But I will be liking your photo later.
__________
Follow Taylor Nam on Twitter: @nam_nam330
