No TV, No Laptop, No Mobile

It turns out i may have had some idols, well ... let me explain,
I dont mean idols like 'statues of a god that i give offerings to' and i dont mean idols like humans that i worship or think are pretty awesome and follow around all day wanting their signature on a piece of paper. I mean idol in the sense of something that you couldnt give up and that you didnt really need (not like food) and that most probably gets in the way of you and God.

I have a lot of random writing on my bag ... its supposed to be there, it came like that, that was its design, it supposed to look cool, anyway you cant really figure out what half of it says because its kinda all over the place but one bit says something about being in a peaceful place with no tv no laptop no mobile, which does seem kinda peaceful, for a short period of time a least. However i didnt realise those things were my idols and that i really should spend time without them to really get 'inner peace', i doubt this was the purpose of the bag its just a coincidence but its strange that that should be written on there in a kinda cool way.

Anyway, it seems you dont realise these things for what they are until you dont have them anymore and you realise what a strong hold they have over your life and your actions, how much of a hold they have over your day, what your do and the time you waste on them. Before Christmas my laptop broke down, now this is quite inconvient because i do actually need it for some stuff, not least to talk with everybody who is either not in the same country as me at the moment or not specifically in this town which is pretty much my whole list of friends and family, also things like internet banking get kinda difficult when you cant get onto the internet! I do realise however that i screw about on the computer a lot and i really dont need to be on here as much as i am when i have the accessibility to do so. Its been a bit of a struggle not being able to check my emails and facebook 20 times a day but it turns out i can survive without it! I think the addiction is passing.

Just after Christmas O2 were mucking about with my phone contract, it had been up for renewal and i wanted to switch to pay as you go but keep my number .... help centres in India do not make this an easy process and once the old sim card was finally disconnected so was the new one, so i had no phone either, this isnt so much of a biggy because i rarely use my phone but you realise how much you use it for other things as soon as you dont have it, i dont have a watch or an alarm clock because i have a phone .... i dont have anybodies phone numbers written down or memorized because i have a phone, ditto addresses. Now i have the thing sorted out, i think, and i have the line working again but i've just stopped using it really - obviously its useful for the clock and stuff but who am i texting? I think the £10 credit i have on there will last quite a long time now.

No TV, im used to this one, i havent had a tv in quite a few years now, however i did have DVDs and iplayers, well i have 2 DVDs now but watching them on a communal DVD player is an interesting concept and i have no laptop so no iplayer, we have a communal tv and i realise that i dont really need to watch anything that on it, the addiction to watching random rubbish was broken a while back, seeing endless reruns of friends and two and a half men is just a time filler, there are a few programmes that i would like to watch but we never watch them and they are the kind of thing i would catch up with on the iplayer if i could, so there doesnt seem like a lot of point watching tv.

Which brings me to a interesting question - what do you do with your day?
I dont have uni work anymore, my friends are scattered all over the place
It seems like (not in a depressing way) i now have a lot more time on my hands, preoccupying yourself all day with the internet and stuff is just a time filler, it keeps you busy and passes your time, but what are you willing this time away for?
Dont get me wrong, this isnt a depressing thing, its a good thing and in a weird way im glad its happened because its freed me in some way from the holds of ... monotony, i just thought it was an interesting thing, a kind of flash back to what it would have been like back in the day before these things were invented. Now you read more, you socialise with the people around you - in the real world not a virtual one, you open your eyes to the world around you, see nature, see what needs to be done, you work still, you make a list of the things you need to do everyday and you actually have time to get them done and at the end of the day you steal someone elses computer and catch up on all the things you have missed and realise the less you use the internet, the less you need it.

Trumpets

I'm reading Sophie's World again, well not 'again' in the sense that i've ever actually finished the book in the past but more in the sense that i've started it a ton of times and haven't reached the end yet because -
a. I'm a slow reader, and
b. Philosophy, in my opinion, can only be read in small portions because you need time to reflect on what you have read so that your brain doesn't explode, and lets face it this book is thousands of years of philosophical thought compacted down into 400 pages so there is a lot to take in!
I'm about half way through, past socrates, descartes, aristole, plato, they've just given the very brief low down on Jesus and then Alberto Knox said something about the trumpets sounding and war cries and i realised that i'd never understood that before, when i read about trumpets in the Bible i think ... cool music - celebrations and worship, it never even crossed my mind to think 'trumpets sounding signalling troops going into battle, a way of telling everyone to attack' How strange that is, now he also points out that Jesus had a cool way of changing the meaning of these old fashioned phrases and perhaps thats something He did there but its still kinda weird that i didn't put two and two together. But anyway now i'm trying to think of situations were that phrase is used and maybe i didn't get the right meaning the first time round, like 'praise Him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise Him with harp and lyre' i figured that was just like ... play music and worship Him, but is it supposed to be 'go fight for His name'?

Any insights?