It can be so easy to live online.
I knew someone once, back when chat rooms were the thing. Maybe they still are; I wouldn't know. Anyway, he was always going off to the nearest internet cafe (we were on tour, and he didn't have a laptop; this was the late '90s and laptops weren't quite as prevalent then) and he would...Chat.
And I couldn't understand it. Why, why would he want to sit in front of a screen for hours when there were Real Live People all around him? Including his fellow cast members, who were only too happy to bicker at him, play loud music in the van, and go dancing at any weirdo nightclub we could find on the road.
On second thought, no wonder the chat rooms looked so appealing...
But the thing is, I find myself online so much now, what with this career development course I'm doing this month, and also looking and applying for jobs, and emailing, and blogging, and let's not forget the monstrous, life-eating FACEBOOK. Where I pop in to see how my friends, local and distant, are doing; to make some smart-ass observations; to answer and write messages; to see if That Guy is online so I can start a conversation. A Chat, if you will.
That Guy refuses to email or phone me, which means, if I was a smart girl instead of a fool, I would leave him the hell alone. Instead, if I see he's online, I start feeling twitchy and doing this little monkey-dance/chant in my head that sounds like this:
lookatmelookatmelookatMEGOSHDARNIT! And then, whether we converse or not, I feel like a bit of a twit.
If I was a very strong girl, I would leave Facebook altogether. I've been tempted, but I really have some great friends on there, and I wouldn't hear from them as much (nor they from me) if I didn't hang on to my account, so for now, it stays.
But I have decided to stay away from it for a while. Messages will come to my email account anyway, so there's no pressing need to go on there compulsively.
My job-searching (god, now there's a whole other blog post) is done for the day.
My coursework also.
I've checked my email enough times, already.
Time to switch off and face the real world, rainy though it is today.
POWER: OFF
1 comment:
OK, then chances are you won't be reading this anytime soon, but recently I've had my internet connection effed with (the landlord, whose connection i was piggybacking on, has moved away) and now life is so different without being able to hop online and be lost in the borg. Tho I keep thinking I'm missing out on all this online stuff but when I pop to the library lo and behold no one has emailed and no one actually has missed me. Not that I have the conventional internetty things like Facebook and whatnot. But the web is a device that is oh-so-pervasive. My partner and I are not dumb peasants obsessed with playing Angry Birds (or whatever the kids are up to these days) but there is a definite *absence* in the house -- through not being able to immediately gratify any question that arises, or to look up things we take for granted as being easy to find out like the weather or business hours or etc., etc., etc.
Power off indeed! You can get so much done, once the jones fades.
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