Starting Over

In trying to recover my attention, I've found a lot of that work has been rethinking my relationship to my things and the purpose of them all. I've found that I'm distressed by the layer of the technological over everything. (I really can't stop thinking about this since watching Cronenberg's The Shroud; here's the trailer on YouTube). Primarily, of course, I mean my cellphone and my laptop. It is hard to reckon with what to do with a small computer in your pocket, but turning off notifications seems to be the simplest, most effective thing to do. I've done that. I've also embraced the email newsletter from news sites I like. I'm not interested in stalking web pages and what I've found is that I would usually channel my boredom into this "surfing." Why? Giving up the routine of visiting websites has been the hardest. Why am I reading these sites I don't care about (Polygon, Kotaku, The Verge, and so on)? I find my attention turning more toward local news as it is anyway and the…