Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging (Part Two)

II.

When my world was inverted (instead of pleasurably introverted as it is as a cyberwriter); when all that I could do from dawn to dusk and then into the wee hours of the morning was put the nose to the grindstone and achieve work, I was not alone. Everyone around me was tweeting me - or so it seemed; metaphorically. When I had adopted this pro-forma project philosophy, all I could breathe was work.

Lucky for me, I was in disaster recovery-mode. I was nurturing my resiliency, personally, socially, culturally, I was at one with the need to use physical and intellectual rigor to fight for the existence of the place where I was from (which through the work of the US Government and the natural phenomenology of hurricanes had wrought severe damage to this hometown). I...digress.

When one is caught up in one's projects, it is hard to turn off the phone.

In our modern world, the evolutions from beepers to tweeters ties us to technologies in ways which we love and absorb. Sometimes, we hate these technologies too; but, usually this sense is frowned upon or considered anti-social. So, let's assume that we love our technologies.

Anyway, when I was in the thrust of these previous epochs of my work life, I loved taking airplane flights. I used the airplane as analogy for what I encouraged my fellow disaster recovery comrades to also embrace - the retreat from 24 hour phone and message cycles.

In travel, we have so many opportunities to be something temporarily. This ambiguity speaks to the case of our modern life.

Last night, we watched a theater production of the "Prisoner of 2nd Avenue," a 1970's play by Neil Simon. It was a surprisingly hip and current rendition of times changing around those who cannot move forward. I could not place it fully in my own life. Yet, it had angst and urbanity.

At the beginning of theater and cinema, as the curtains rise, the managers they have conceived of nice ways of asking us to turn off our cellphones.

It is too bad there are not more ways of finding out how to do this. It is too bad that as a blogger I have not found better apps and widgets for helping me manage the distance between the objective to blog, write, and serve the communities at home (or those we visit on our trip), and how to enjoy the spirituality of travel once the netbook [laptop] gets sick. In previous millennia, it was your own sickness from the elements which brought you down; now, it is sickness from removal of portable media. I am unsure which illness is graver.

That said, I am off to take in more of London (camera in pocket, pen and scrap of paper in breast pocket).....