The days without internet

My monitor died last Sunday.
After years of emiting a low but terrible eeeeee-sound whenever the power was turned OFF, the monitor finally died a true death. I will not miss that sound.
Today, I got a new monitor and am, in a manner of speaking, "back online".

Sidenote: the new monitor apparently has an extra feature which allows you to turn it on its side so you can more easily read documents in your avegare A4 or similar letter size. Which is truly handy seeing as the monitor is almost perfectly square. Oh well, it's the thought that counts. XD

So here's the kicker: I did not miss being online. I miss hanging out with my friends, I miss taking classes and going for a cup of coffee (or a chai latte or anything with milk in it I could drink abundance off outside Finland that alas, is all forbidden here where all milk products, but especially milk of the runny-kind, makes my anus bleed) afterwards, I miss the unbearable heat and the close proximity to everything new and not understanding if people were insulting me or being nice. All of those things I miss daily, but being online? I did not miss being online.

The unfortunate thing though, is that our information society is built on the fact that everyone is online all the time. So when I went to look for a place that would sell cheap monitors I was told to look up the address and the public transports there online. Or to order online because it would be quicker for me to order things from the online version of the store I was standing in, than to have them make the order for me right then and there.
How this makes sense, I have yet to figure out.
Also, all job applications must be filled out/sent online as do all my drawing and photographing projects.

What did I do with my time? I slept better. I got to actually take my clothes off and get between the sheets and not just pass out in my jeans and wake up when some part of my body started hurting from being in the wrong position for too long or when the clock would chime 4am signaling a good time to go wash my face. I ate less and wasted less time doing so while still managing to eat well.
I read 2 books (Looking For Alaska by John Green which was very awesome and you should all read it and Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner which was.... probably best viewed within it's cultural and publishing era context. The glowing personal profile articles in the added material were extremely annoying.) and checked out 2 other books that were on my reading list for this year and started on one of them (Kill All The Brutes by Sven Lindqvist). I wrote letters. I hatched a project to mess with this damn country and its fear of intimacy. And I got to terms to actually wanting to be a research scientist. How's that for 2,5 days? Yeah, I'm pretty much going to study, and probably practice to some extent, to be a research scientist. Which is nice.
And I hung out with a friend and had a small amount of alcohol and it was the best damn drink I've had in a long long while. Sitting at the terrace on a lovely pre-Summer day was nice too.
AND I might have been caught redhanded oggling at a cute guy. And my head might have exploded.
Yes, this happens to girls.

Today, there were sparrows in the sky.

I don't quite know how I feel about the internet. It obviously has it's place (though I have to say I was a little dismayed that the numberservice I called to find I number I'd stupidly forgotten to write down from an email, used Google to try and locate first the office of the organization, then the number of their front desk from their website, as opposed to using their own database with all the listed, non-secret phone numbers in this country), but most people I know are terribly illequiped to use the internet "wisely".
I'd go even so far as to suggest if quitting the internet and switching to using only phones might help a lot of people who currently suffer from various forms of dissociation.

Spreading information serves a purpose. Being in touch with people far away serves a purpose. But there's a very fundamental difference between shouting into the void like I'm doing now and sitting with a group of friends and talking about all of these things above. Like Smell-O-Vision, that's just something you can't artificially replace.