I Want to Surf

Do you have a surf routine?  Because I sure do...

I always thought coasting around on the internet was fun because there were no boundaries.  I could click as fast as I wanted, be totally random...you know...just go with the flow.  Oh how I pine for the days when I could surf YouTube for hours (I'd like to think that whole activity is called "YouTubing"--like Inner Tubing but inside. On the computer. With a bowl of chips and a diet coke.) I was always thrilled by the possibilities.  What could I stumble on that would change the course of my day?  Exciting.

I realized today, as I'm sitting in my little gray half box here in Cubicleland that, just as any long term relationship does, my frenzied, quick-clicking love affair with Mozilla Firefox has become (dum dum dum)...predictable.  My days of surfing are gone, replaced by the rolodex-like efficiency with which I check all of my "stops" on the interwebs.  I have a whole cycle of sites and logins that have to be tended to.  My routine goes something like this:

1. Check e-mail.  14 messages appear every morning like clock work.  None are from a real human person that I know.
2. Check google reader.  Read FML (usually 26-30 quick twitter-like entries), Cake Wrecks, and Chicago Sun-Times first.  Then peruse the other 15-20 blogs I have in there.  If Meghan or Marc post, they get first dibs.  Nun blogs (of which I have a shiny collection) get saved for last.
3. Go to Facebook.  Noodle around there for awhile looking at the most recent newsfeed.  If there's a quiz that looks good, take it (and 12 others just like it.)
4. Check school e-mail.  NOTHING good is ever in there. It's the black hole of interesting things.
5. Write on one or both of my own blogs (I am literally in this step right now...it's the real thing, people.  This is not a drill).
6. Back to Gmail to futz around on Calendar or Documents for a little while (I do keep my school work in Documents, so that's a least a little legitimate).
7. Move on to doing other things (sometimes even not online...(gasp)) but keep Gmail minimized just in case something interesting comes in.

And so it goes every single day. What has happened to me?  How have I become boring in my online life? I'm trying to figure out the change.  I think I might blame Facebook as it's become the clearinghouse for all weird, wacky news that I used to glean from other sources independently.  But even still...I don't surf anymore.  And I miss it.  Frankly, I wouldn't even know where to go to start doing that again.

I'm just sitting here, hanging out on the sandbar gettin' a sunburn.  I gotta head back out and try to catch something interesting...right after I check my inbox...