Heading Californ-ee-way to Find Internet

[Danoz]

Opening, of course, with a dual South Park and Grapes of Wrath reference. If you haven’t seen it, I would highly recommend you watch it on South Park Studios and stream it live– then read Steinbeck’s 535-page verbose and joyless reflection on the Great Depression to fully appreciate Parker and Stone’s satire. Having just moved into a new apartment in Arlington, I had to spend two evenings suffering from one of the worst things a human being in the 21st century can endure… no internet. Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that internet addition as actually a real condition that some people suffer from, or that the Onion reports 90% of our waking hours are spent staring at glowing rectangles (which in my case as a web and new media monkey is actually true). I actually tried to check my email three or four times without a connection and checked every corner of the apartment for an unencrpyted signal. In one despirate attempt, I opened my browser and typed the address for Google in hopes that internet (which we all know is floating around us like a cloud of invisable fog) would miraculously appear in my Firefox browser. I had to leave. Much like our animated friends in South Park I headed west… to Corner Bakery for free wifi. I guiltily purchased a small coffee and danish as payment to the internet gods and cornered away into a fetal position to check my igoogle, gmail, flickr, twitter, facebook, skype and AIM. When I returned to my awesome new apartment I was left with few options for 10PM on a Monday night. I could 1. Read a book, 2. Watch a movie, or 3. Photoshop Falkor the Luckdragon into an image with President Obama.

I rushed home on lunch break the other day to let the cheerful man from Verizon into my apartment, trustingly left him the key to my apartment and went back to work for an afternoon meeting. My first night with the return of internet I did what anybody would do in my situation and bathed in lightning speed FIOS, chatted on AIM and Facebook and watched the unedited Cantonese version of “The Legend of Drunken Master.” Does it get much better than this?


(Sporting a post from my new blog at http://www.porterbrew.com -- let me know what you think!)

 

[Spot's Meow]

You know, I'm actually surprised that I'm not more addicted to the Internet. I used to be, way back when I was a teenager and actually had free time and didn't have to work on a computer all day.

Now free time is at a premium. After staring at a screen all day at work the last thing I want to do is come home and stare at the computer some more. These flat screen monitors that are so prevalent now tend to hurt my eyes after a while.

Also, I don't even need the Internet for school as much as I used to. As a graduate student in the history field most of my research/work takes place in archives and libraries, searching for obscure sources that often can't be found online. Fun times! My internship and hopefully future career also take place in the stacks of the archives, not on a computer.

And finally, I don't seem to have many friends online anymore. What I mean is, in high school and early college, my close friends and I always communicated through AIM and LiveJournal (and later MySpace). I would spend hours and hours instant messaging with friends, late into the night. Now, I haven't used AIM in years, and last time I restored my laptop I didn't even bother to reinstall it. I rarely use Facebook or MySpace anymore and the only real communicating I do online is here at the BBS and through my school's web classroom with my colleagues.

So maybe I need more friends or something. I don't really talk with people outside of work or school like I used to, because my life is in such transition at the moment that I don't know if I'll be around these same people a year from now. Plus, there's just no time!

Soooo in conclusion, I actually have been using the Internet much less than I used to, and when I went on vacation for a week a couple of months ago I barely even noticed that I was without it!