Flickr – ing.

I’ve been putting some (hundreds) of my trip photos on Flickr.

Trawling through them, sorting, fiddling with, listing, uploading, tagging, labelling, admiring.

It’s a big project I’ve taken on. I live my days around it. I don’t do it all day long, but I make spaces in my day just for that. I wondered if I had become obsessive compulsive in this desire. I’m moving quickly  in case my interest wanes. I’m not even half done.

And sitting at the computer, following my list, clicking, describing and organising, a thought came into my cluttered mind.

This is just like working.

 

 

I realised I meant having a job, something I had to do because I was getting paid for it. I had to get it right and do it properly. People had expectations of my performance. What I was doing mattered to more people than just me, sitting here at my laptop on the table that simulated a desk.  I couldn’t be away from it too long, but I needed breaks to refresh and rejuvenate my approach and my results.

And when the whizz bang fault proof costs a bit extra but is well worth it memory card started playing up I got work related stress. I got myself into a lather of panic and fury and I wanted to go and give that salesman a shellacking. And then I calmed down and realised I had copied the memory cards onto the little black box my daughter had given me. Way way back at the beginning of the time when my travels were behind me.

It made more work for me, to go back and find the photos that I’ve listed as not uploading and then upload them. But the problem has a solution and I will beaver away until it’s sorted out.

 

 

Oh, this is just like working.

All this social networking, all these attempts to learn and understand and connect and use, pale by comparison with this unexpected adrenaline rush. When did I begin, when will I know and recognise that it’s the end and I can stop twittering and facebooking and instagramming and tumblring?

All this gardening, the clipping and weeding and planting and digging cannot be defined by a starting and stopping date either. A garden is like a house, in that the work is never done forever, there’s always another dish to wash and another tree to prune.

But this, this, is just like work. I am busy, preoccupied, doing an assignment that will end when it’s done. When the uploading, the organising, the writing about is over. I can tinker forever of course, but last photo and mission accomplished.

I know it’s an illusion, that I’m feeding a need I haven’t been paying attention to.

Working.

How I’ve missed it.