Disconnected

For the entire month of January I have been without Internet in my home.

Cue gasp of shock, horror and/or disgust, possibly even some mild vomiting from those who have grown up in this technological age. How is it possible? No one can survive without Internet! How do you watch films, series; download music; keep in the social know on Facebook? In short, where is your life?

Answer: Redirected.

I say 'redirected' because I don't want to sit here (at work, by the way) and become one of those self-satisfied smug people who bemoans the youth of today, decrying them for their apparent lack of interest in other cultural (or indeed non-cultural) activities. For, while there is a rather weighty argument that many people do spend too much time in front of a screen - whether it be that of a computer or a television - and waste many an hour talking crap on MSN and commenting on people's Facebook statuses, the truth is that the Internet is an integral part of our daily lives now. Even when I watch a film on DVD, legally, there is still the urge to find out more about the actors, and where is Wikipedia? On a net that I have no access to. Or if I really badly want to find out which other films Jennifer Connelly from 'Labyrinth' has been in, I have to a) actually remember to do this next step, and b) wait until I'm at work and waste a few minutes searching for the answers there. (In case you're interested, she was also in 'Requiem for a Dream' and 'A Beautiful Mind'. And she's married to Paul Bettany! The Web is truly a wonderful thing...)

So in order to not go completely mental I have to fill up my time at home doing other things. At the moment it helps that I'm translating a play from Catalan into English, which is eating up a large amount of my weekends. I think if I had Internet, I would highly resent this fact. I would probably much prefer to rot my brain watching clips from YouTube and other random sites. As it is, I have little choice but to plough on. Besides which, it's an incredible play, ergo it's no hardship. 
Another hobby on the increase: reading. I love reading and I've always read. In the last month, however, I have read far more than I normally would have done if I had Internet. Really, then, it seems to be mostly in my favour, not being bound by the electrical demands of cyberspace and cybertime, a word which may not exist but it really should; that's when you spend so much time mooching about on the web you lose track of the normal temporal shift.

Yet, I feel so disconnected at times. Before, it was so easy to arrange a Skype date, to quickly leave a message on someone's Wall for the next day, to merely search for random pieces of information that won't ever leave you alone at night but when you try to remember them the next day they've vanished like piss in the soil: you won't ever get them back.
My point, then, is that I miss the comfort of home Internet. It may well be good for me intellectually but, sometimes, after a hard day's work I don't want intellect. I don't want smart or cultural. I want something to watch that I don't have melt my brain trying to understand; I want to rest my poor wee eyeballs and not have them struggle to follow words in a lineal order.

But, as my parents told me when I was younger, ' "I want" never gets'. So I shall go home and read my nice fat book.