Well everybody, I have a confession to make: I have recently moved. I've gone out of my parent's basement (for the second time--don't assume I've been living there my whole life) and gotten a room in an apartment with a new roommate. Hip, hip, hooray! There's just one downside.
There's no internet.
Now, my roommate gets by with a smartphone and a limited data plan, whereby she can check her emails, her Facebook account (assuming she has one), and looking up various nearby locale. Me, I have an old flip phone that freaks out if people send me group messages. I suppose I could just buckle down and get a smartphone, but that would require purchasing something as expensive as my tablet and then agreeing to a fifty-dollar-per-month contract, on average. My phone currently costs me around $20 per month, and as anyone who has ever moved knows, right after the move you don't want to add more costs to your monthly budget than you already have. What with student loans repayments, car and health insurance, monthly rent, heating, and gas payments, and just stocking an empty fridge and cupboard, my heart faints at the thought of adding either a monthly phone or internet payment.
How, then, am I writing this blog post? My work has a small library, at which I do necessities like pay online bills, check my email, and think about catching up on TV shows (we are not supposed to stream videos, since that gobbles up bandwidth). I also slack off on other necessities like changing my mailing address and registering my new address with the DOV. (But hey, it's Thanksgiving. I'm going to my parents' for dinner today anyway, so I can do all that then)
Having limited internet access has had an interesting effect on my life. Suddenly, I have so much extra time! I can no longer binge watch television shows on my favorite procrastination site, Netflix. I can't waste time looking at fan art of my favorite books, television shows, and video games via Pinterest. I can't scroll through miles and miles of Facebook feed trying to find things that aren't articles or random pictures re-posted from another re-post to figure out what's going on in my friends' lives, all while ending up clicking on time-wasting and error-prone articles and quizzes to figure out what type of princess/fantasy creature/political viewpoint I am (although I still have to scroll through miles and miles of those things, all without clicking on articles, during my limited internet time). I can't go to news site after news site, trying to find some joy and comfort in a world seemingly bogged down with hatred.
So what can I do with my time? In the past (nearly) two weeks, I've made dinners, washed dishes, unpacked, cleaned bathrooms, played the piano, gone to church activities, watched a couple movies with my roommate, watched a movie in the theater with my brother and sister-in-law, done laundry, read two novels, worked forty-plus hour weeks, read an entire book in the Bible (okay, it was the Book of Esther), had deep conversations with my roommate about science and religion, played video games on my old Game Boy Advance for a brief amount of time (yes, I dragged that out of the depths of my parents' basement when I learned there would be no internet), gone to a dinner at a friend's house, explored a bit of the neighborhood, exercised, and written.
Oh my, have I written. I've written more in the past week than I have in the past two months, and that, to me, is incredible. I used to be able to scribble out in an hour a single page by hand, with many starts and stops. The other day, in an hour and a half, I wrote four pages. I wasn't aware of my hand moving faster than usual, but it apparently was. I slogged through a tough spot I've been working on for months and moved on to a scene I thoroughly enjoyed. While that scene still has its problems, I feel like they are manageable, that running across those problems isn't cause for dismay. I still have a tendency to procrastinate my writing until a half an hour before bedtime, bedtime being the time at which I will get eight hours of sleep before having to get up for work, but once I start writing I feel like I can't stop.
As I've begun writing in earnest, my dreams have started to become more vivid again. And when I mean vivid, I mean full-length movie vivid, with plot, villains, usually me as some sort of superhero, often a soundtrack, and a fairly coherent plot (for a dream). I still don't always remember my dreams when I wake, but I remember they were epic.
So why is this post on my writing blog instead of my lesser-known personal blog? Because unplugging me from around-the-clock access to the internet is possibly the best thing I've ever done for myself. People keep asking me when I'm going to get internet or if I'm going to get a smartphone, and I just shrug my shoulders and say, "Maybe never." They are aghast, agape, astounded at this answer. They can't remember a world without the internet always at their fingertips. I can--I didn't have steady access to the internet until I was well into high school. It's not that the internet didn't exist (I'm not that old), it's just that my parents kept our computer under lock and key much of the time. It wasn't until college, when I got my own hand-me-down laptop, that I suddenly had access to as much internet as I could ever possibly want.
I started writing in junior high. In high school I was still going strong. By college I was still strong, but I started having less and less time to write. When I entered my first job out of college, my time for writing was a precious commodity. When I went back to college, the internet became my place of refuge. Then, exiting college a second time and not getting my dream job, the internet (most specifically online movies and television) became my cage. Now that I have limited access to the internet, I'm starting to remember why I enjoyed writing so much and why my dream is still to become a well-known author of children's books. I don't care if I ever become rich. Fame would be nice, but only to the extent that it means that thousands of people have read and enjoyed my books. All I've ever wanted to do is write, and I don't need the internet for that--not all the time.
For the rest of the time, there's always the library.
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