-Brian Mendonca
Over the season my smart phone has been under
siege. Almost every day in the morning I
am confronted by the terse message: ‘Your chat history has been deleted.’ The
advisory then goes on to deliver the happy news that if I do not restore it now
it will be lost forever.
I do the obvious. I opt to restore. However that is
only a pyrrhic victory. When the chat is finally restored after tense moments
it anyway erases at least a week of WhatsApp messages.
In the beginning I panicked. But after a few instances
I became used to it. I realized how dependent I was becoming on my phone. I was
allowing a few messages to shape my mood. Worse still if I imagined I felt
slighted at some messages, they lay there to rebuke me on the phone. I
sometimes derived a masochistic pleasure revisiting such messages if only to
divine the intent of the person who sent the message.
So when a whole bunch of messages went to the happy
hunting grounds, my heart missed a beat. What was more curious was that I did
not know what I had lost. But then I asked myself, were they worth fretting
over? I came round to the realization that what I didn’t know didn’t matter.
Gradually I became relieved that through some
supra-natural intervention my phone was in self-delete mode. This being the
case, I had to actually talk to
people to ask them to resend work-related stuff which had been erased, and
which was needed. It was embarrassing. In one case, the person resent the info
and the chat history blanked out deleting it again. So the next time it was
sent cheerfully, I copy pasted it onto gmail and posted it to myself. The
uncertainty of the data remaining prompted me to pull up my socks and email the
work pronto – instead of procrastinating.
We can choose what we want to carry over into
2020. The New Year is a clean slate. All
the history is gone. It is time to begin afresh. We can take our emotional
baggage into the next year or we can leave it behind.
To lose chat history is to lose memories.
Yet memories linger on.
She's got a smile it
seems to me
Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything
Was as fresh as the bright blue sky.
Reminds me of childhood memories
Where everything
Was as fresh as the bright blue sky.
We recently watched A26 play ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ by Guns N’
Roses at a wedding in the fields of Sangolda. The 1987 smash hit was written from a poem by
Axl Rose for his fiancé Erin Everly who he married.
But amid the heavy metal riffs of ‘Sweet Child of Mine,’
an actual child was being repeatedly pushed aside when he ventured to pick up
an ice-cream for himself at the self-service counter. The scramble of adults
for free food at social events is obnoxious. Yet, as we left the venue, we saw
lots of food wasted.
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