See, yesterday after I ate breakfast at noon, an unexpected thought fluttered through my head: what if I don't use the internet or my computer for the rest of the day? So that's what I did. The idea to do it came before the reasons occurred to me. There are 1 and 1/2 reasons.
1: Every once in a while I have a strange desire to pack up and disconnect myself from the rest of the world. You know, like Chris McCandless. I feel like too many things control me, and many of them stem from my computer or the internet. I want to stop caring about twitter and email and what happens next on whatever TV show I'm watching. So I turned off my computer.
1.5: I'm tired of being disappointed when I wake up. I don't know where the disappointment comes from because I have low expectations (or do I?) for almost everything, but there it is in the morning. So, again, instead of checking autostraddle every 10 minutes or playing bubbleshooter and not being able to stop, instead of sitting hunchbacked over my desk musing over how huge the internet world is and how I can access so much of it from inside my room, I closed my computer and went out into the real world.
Just kidding. I didn't go outside. But I did really turn off my internet.
Fourteen hours without a computer is not really that long. Every time I go to New York or Philadelphia I have no internet for about that amount of time. Granted, I do have movies if I want, but mostly I count on sleeping for over half my trip.
Before I had a laptop I was still using the giant desktop in my basement, which one day, decided it would just turn off whenever it felt like it. As you can imagine, this was highly inconvenient. One second I'd be chatting on MSN writing a paper, and the next thing you know I'd be staring at a blank screen. It turns out the fan was broken, so the computer would heat up and not cool down and then it would turn itself off so as not to explode. That took a while to fix. My dad said I could use his laptop from 1995 but I would've rather smashed my head in with a brick, so I did my homework instead.
In any case, I figured I could handle a day without my computer, and it would be a good character builder or something.
The first thing I did was clean my desk. It took me a while. I found lots of old school shit, scrap papers, important documents, and old birthday cards that still had money in them. That was the most exciting part. I made $140 for cleaning my desk! The universe is trying to tell me something maybe.
I didn't have my itunes to listen to so I had to listen to CDs the way they were meant to be listened to. I listened to Around the Well by Iron & Wine, Asleep at Heaven's Gate by Rogue Wave, So Jealous by Tegan and Sara, and You Can Play These Songs With Chords by Death Cab for Cutie.
Then I started an art project that I can't tell you about because it's a secret. But it took me a long time. Luckily I had all this space on my desk to actually make "art".
I finished reading 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'. It was good! I haven't completely processed my feelings about it yet though. I think it might actually be one that I won't read again unless it's to quote something.
I talked to 3 people I hadn't talked to in a really long time. Tania came over and we played video games in our sweatpants and that was nice.
Sometimes I really wanted to play bubbleshooter but mostly I didn't miss my computer. I didn't have any emails to read and I sifted through tweets but none of them were at me so all in all I don't think my presence on the internet was noticed or missed. That's okay! It made me feel good actually. Like there's no reason for me to sit in front of gmail all day.
On that note, I'm going to go use the HMV gift card I found while cleaning my desk and then I'm going to do something that doesn't involve staring at a 13" screen.
2 comments:
hmm the internet does have a way to capture you. luckily my laptop has the same problem your desktop had. i think i broke most attachments to the internet.. it does feel good!
now i must find interesting things to read though, because i work. i find that i only go on the internet when i have a job. because there's a computer.. hmm
sam: i find that if i worked more i would go on the internet less. probably because i'd be at work. but when i can't think of things to do i just resort to my computer which is probably bad.
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