I Spend Too Much Time Online

It’s summer. I should be off doing summer-y things. And sometimes I do, but being a WAHM doesn’t quit for the summer, if you know what I’m sayin’. While my dear son is home from school, however, I find that all my online activities have to work with the attention span of a 5 year old, who comes and bothers me every 32 seconds during “quiet time” with Legos that have to be pulled apart (Lego, you really need a mom hack tool for this other than my now-badly-splintered fingernails).

SO instead of having a blessed 20 minutes to concentrate on researching fermentation, I find that I doodle online waiting for the next interruption. Some of this is all your guys’ fault, because you guys put so much fabulous stuff on the internet that just works with the summer WAHM/SAHM conundrum. And then I realize that except for going to the park a couple hours, I’ve spent half a day online and gotten absolutely nothing done.

Here’s some of my favorite ways you guys kill my productivity:

Cat pictures

The running joke used to be that the internet was for porn. The parent generation of the modern internet (That’s GenX to you kiddies) is 40ish and has a handful of kids making them nuts and exhausted now. Sex? Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat. Not to mention, it might land you another kid, and the idea of having to deal with more diapers probably makes you want to chew your own limbs off.

So now the internet is for cat pictures. Everybody loves cats. If you don’t believe me, go read Reddit.

Random Indie Online Games (and Really Old Ones)

I was looking for the modern-day equivalent of math blaster or something educational to put my kid onto during a rainy day. Forget Farmville, I discovered 3rd World Farmer! It’s much more interesting to play when I’ve got civil wars, poachers, and 1st world economic collapses  to deal with. And then I discovered that someone created an Apple IIe web emulator plugin and has a site with a ton of the old games.

That’s when I lost about three days to the Oregon Trail.

Facebook

I dislike Facebook for a lot of things, but it’s where all my virtual community hangs out. Unless you get a babysitter for everyone, real life friend interaction at this stage kind of sucks. You’re lucky if you can manage an ongoing discussion, and because it has to somehow work with the attention spans of toddlers, it’s likely to be broken up with awkward silences and a lot of chatting about kids. So Facebook is now my preferred form of social interaction, mostly because I can have conversations where, while there might be a time delay, I can type a complete sentence.

 YouTube

Most people don’t realize how magical YouTube is. When I’m having a particularly challenging day, I play a game where I type in two random words into the search window. There is always, ALWAYS, a video about it. No matter what two words I choose, humanity and YouTube has never failed me yet. It’s a great pastime, seeing if I can find something someone else hasn’t thought of and made a video of.

Don’t believe me? Here’s exploding dinosaurs set to the 1812 overture.

Last but not least… Other people’s blogs

I know a ton of funny people. But the ones I seem to gravitate to are just a little bit troll-ey too, just like I have a tendency to be. Real life is frickin’ hilarious if you have the right spin on it.

I wander from site to site, coveting my own mug with the tiny vulgar unicorn, wondering who I have to bribe to get some loving from the brands I’d love to work with, and snickering over other people’s hilarious misfortunes and experiences. Which is good, because if I’m putting my hilarious misfortunes and experiences out there for people to read, I should get a few others back.

I can’t be alone in the art of procrastination. How do you guys prefer to waste your time?