Welcome to My Month Long Writing Challenge

Hi Friends,

After picking up my grocery order yesterday, I witnessed a car accident while waiting in traffic. It wasn’t a bad accident but it was more than a fender bender. The vehicles involved weren’t moving at high speeds but I saw the driver’s side glass break. The area where the accident occurred was on a main road outside across the street from a grocery store and just outside of a strip mall. Two pedestrians ran over to assist, immediately following the accident and it looked like other people got of out their cars to help. I, on the other hand, changed lanes so that I could avoid the accident and immediately starting driving the other direction.

I asked myself if I was acting cowardly.

I decided that I wasn’t because my small children were in the car and I might have behaved differently if that had not been with me.

Ten minutes later, I was at a park with my boys and I had a free moment to myself * and all I wanted to do was Google my head off.

I wanted to ask Google, “What should you do if you witness a car accident”?

But I didn’t. I resisted the urge. Instead, I wrote down everything I was thinking. I think I use the internet too much. Like way too much.

How did people make decisions about life before the internet? How did people decide things in the minute before cell phones?

Some backstory, I didn’t have a smartphone until four years ago. I am kind of an late adaptor and a bit of Luddite in that way. I am also cheap. I thought that life with a smart phone would be redundant because I felt that I was usually in-front of a computer if I wanted that sort of information. For the most part, this suited me okay. I didn’t spend a ton of time looking things up while I was engaged in other activities, but I did get lost a lot because my car GPS wasn’t very good and didn’t have the addresses of businesses when for example I would spontaneously want to to go to Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks. Also my cell phone camera was not good and by the time 2017 rolled around, I wanted to take more pictures of my then one year old son.

I had more than a few incidences when I got lost with a crying child in the car so I was very glad when my husband surprised me with my smart phone for Mother’s Day in 2017.

The picture taking capabilities and the WordPress app really helped me get into blogging and for those reasons, I am so grateful that he got me a new phone. Yet, I am also addicted to my phone now. I hate how addicted I am. It is not just social media that I am addicted to. It is all of it. I can’t seem to make decisions without consulting my phone.

I feel like my instincts are a little dead. I feel like I am not tapping into intuition that I used to have. If you have seen the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, I feel like I ingested too much Brawndo (the Gatorade-like drink that is making society stupid).

I have read about celebrities like Simon Cowell and Justin Bieber who don’t have phones and I have been more than a little bit curious about trying that, but at the same time, I think that might be hard to do if you have to run your own life and your don’t have assistants to find out information for you.

So in order to combat my addiction, for the next month, I am going to write things down in the tiny notebook in my purse instead of using my phone when I have a spare minute. I am going to challenge myself to publish every day for the next month. So hold on to your hats, dear readers. I am about to spew a whole bunch of posts at you.

Exactly one month from yesterday, when this challenge started for me, is my 10th wedding anniversary, so it is a date that I will easily keep in mind.

So that is all for now Friends.

I will see you tomorrow. We will see if my instincts will be sharper in a month.

Your friend,

Katie

*Is it tabu to admit that you don’t always want to pay attention to your children? I am ignoring them pretty hardcore now, while I write this by-the-way.