So, I’m back at uni. Golf claps for me all round. It’s only taking me one hundred years to get a Bachelor under my belt … and, come to think of it, a bachelor ‘under my belt’… but that’s another blog, I think.
Where was I? Oh yes; distracted.
I was distracted … in the toilet.
Let me explain.
I've been spending my days impounded inside the fortress of SCU's Library where I generally make a lot of noise about all the studying I'm doing but just sort paper and daydream about food and check Facebook compulsively.
Earlier this week my writing teacher shared a poignant article on why writers are the biggest procrastinators going. It couldn’t have been timelier, I thought, as I sat in a little cubicle, well beyond when the original purpose of the visit had been executed, amused, entertained – and somewhat nostalgic - for what lay before me.
Friends, I was looking at a good ol fashioned graffitied-to-buggery toilet wall in an educational institution!
I don’t think I have seen one of these since high school (284 years ago, give or take)!
I couldn’t help myself but get caught up in the chain reaction of conversations smeared from brick to crevice to next brick. All the while losing sense of time and the fact that I was indeed, using this ancient past-time as a procrastination tool - just as all the authors who had come before me in this stall had.
One comment invited a counter-comment, followed by an even more obnoxious remark. Fights flared up between strangers: Duels of the pens ensued.
And over in another corner of the wall, some creative personality had spent time anonymously doodling a detailed other-being's face with nothing more than a blue pen. What were they avoiding out there in book-world?
The distressed reaching out to the ether.
Over in another area was the peace-hippy spreading the ...
Then there's deviant who just can’t keep their mouth shut/over-shares.
And the clever guy (or girl…I hope).
The indulger.
The more I read, the more I realised that I was being sucked into the original Facebook: the original ‘wall’ where people splash one-way comments for all to see. The only difference is this medium was anonymous. And no-one was making advertising money out of it.
Considering the similarities of the toilet wall graffiti and Facebook, you're thinking what I am, aren't you ... you are wondering if, perhaps the story of a steely unlikable computer geek designing Facebook to wield his petty wrath on an ex- girlfriend, might be a diversion of the fact that maybe – just maybe – one of the most successful empires in history was actually conceived in a toilet stall ...?
The great philosopher and conspiracy theorist, Monzanious, signing off as she leaves you all with the image of a nineteen year old Mark Zuckerberg taking a dump….
I know. Slow news day.
But if I've achieved nothing else today, I can confidently assume I've out-procrastinated you all.
