The cable internet at my apartment has been out for almost a week now. It's actually made my evenings at home strangely peaceful and pleasant. It isn't exactly that I don't have things I need to do -- the overabundance of job-search-related posts lately has been due to the fact that every time I'm near an internet connection I'm frantically looking up potential employers -- but if the mechanism to do them isn't there, the amount of time I'm willing to spend fretting about it is fairly limited. While I could technically carry my laptop to Kingman to use the internet connection there, the last time I did so I ended up eating chocolate-covered strawberries and playing Scrabble. So I may as well save myself the trouble of carrying my laptop and just go for the fruit and games to begin with.
I never really realized how much reliable, constant internet access ate into my time. True, I'm ages behind in Pandagon posts and webcomic storylines, but I've watched movies, read books, talked to my roommates, played with my cat, unpacked most of my room, cooked dinner every night, returned my library books, written in my journal, gotten to bed on time, and not felt particularly rushed about any of it. A month ago I couldn't have fathomed such a thing. I'm finding myself dearly wishing that the internet at Kingman had gone out a few more times while I was huddling in my basement ignoring everyone and getting irritated about how little time I had to do anything.
I'm telling myself now that I'll remember in the future to disconnect myself from the little glowing screen and do other things with my time. I doubt it will work that way, though; the thing about taking things for granted is that by definition, you don't realize you're doing it. Maybe there's an internet service provider with whom I can arrange to periodically lose service no matter how much I howl and protest and insist that it be restored. Actually, maybe that's Comcast. They're mystified (and unhappy about driving their trucks up my tiny steep dead-end street), so I have a few more days with my fantasy books. And the much-promised apartment-warming slash game night slash maybe a potluck dinner! Oooo! Who's free on Friday?
Posted by dianna at May 30, 2007 12:53 PMMan, I hear that. I've been de facto internetless this last week. Technically I have internet, except I spend every waking moment at the office. I can access the internet from government computers, but Big Brother is watching and he'd prefer I not use his bandwidth to read blogs and video game news sites.
It's astounding how the world keeps turning even when I don't read Matthew Yglesias's latest political musings within 30 minutes of his posting them. I briefly tried cutting down on my internet consumption early last semester, only letting myself use the internet when I was on my laptop at school. But gradually I fell off that and now here I am, logging on the moment I get home from 15 hours at the office.
What is it about the internet that makes it so compelling in a way that, for me at least, television isn't?
Posted by: MoltenBoron at May 31, 2007 09:20 PM