My Puffs Of Oxygen For The Day

 When you’re drowning in a sea of work and you need to come up for air, what better way when you’re stuck in front of the computer than to steer towards green corners of the virtual world that revive you? This is very often even better than that tea break or coffee break or cigarette break. For one thing, you don’t need to get up and go anywhere – all you need to do is click on your URL of choice and get your fix to keep you going for the next couple of hours.

Every one has his own list of where to go for his oxygen puffs – as long as it revives and relaxes you, that’s your special oxygen puff. I’ve got a couple of places I go to and before I enter those wonderful places, I give myself a time limit – ten minutes – not a second more.

HubPages is a recent discovery and there’s a lot of oxygen inhaling I do here. Of course, if I let myself go, I could spend hours reading all those fascinating hubs. It’s like a voyage of discovery – hidden in a whole lot of mediocre attempts at writing, you suddenly come across a nugget – and you want to pan that writer’s work to see if there are more. When that particular writer has 200 or maybe more hubs, you know you just can’t yield to temptation or you’ll have a very irate client grumbling about missed deadlines. So I discipline myself to just a few of those pleasures and go back to my work. Only to come back when my head is reeling with SEO, Copyscape, DupeCop or whatever else so I can recharge my batteries.

Another watering hole I go to for my oxygen fixes is Digitalpoint – sure I go there to keep track of what is going on in the world of the Internet – and try my level best to figure out the whys and the wherefores. However, I also go to their general section and it’s amazing what you can find sometimes. Members reminiscing about pets, family members, views about politics, religion and what have you. When there’s an atmosphere of strife, I quietly retire to come back another time. At other times, I poke around and spend a few moments discovering something funny, something thought-provoking or something touching. Life’s too short to manage short fuses.

The other oxygen supply I rely on is poetry. While I have a well-thumbed Palgrave’s Golden Treasury beside my bed, when I’m online, I usually go to the poetry blogs I’ve bookmarked. Here are a couple of them. Sometimes, I might come across a poet I like and I bookmark the site to return to later on one of my oxygen-seeking breaks.

http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/arts/poems

http://poetswhoblog.blogspot.com/

I know my puffs of oxygen are not what everyone else would think fun or relaxing or reviving. Each has his own oxygen. For some it could be an exercise break, for some it could be an online game break. Whatever it is, as long as it gets you back feeling good, then it’s done what it was supposed to do. Of course, sometimes, I forget that a break means just a few puffs – then I’m tripping the rest of the day!