viva la vie de boheme.

Internet-Free Living: Looks Like a Novel

So, no one has noticed and I’m ok with that, but I don’t get a chance to get on here very often. I have now had three (yes, 3, wow) weeks without internet in my home. This has meant copious amounts of coffee drinking at Pavement and Starbucks (I know, THE DEVIL!) to bum the free wi-fi. I have frozen my Netflix account. I check Facebook regularly on my phone. Twitter too. I’ve been using email for once. It’s such an organized way to cyber-communicate!

But while this all sounds like it is taking up my every waking moment, it is but a flash in my schedule now. No more hours and hours scrolling through Reddit or Tumblr and it’s too inconvenient to spend very long on Facebook even. No more entire days spent watching entire seasons of randomly selected TV shows on Netflix. I don’t really update my Facebook status or upload pictures. I’m finding I have fewer and fewer things to say; fewer things to prove.

Instead I have lived. Not to say I hadn’t before, but there is a different sense of freedom I have felt these three weeks. I’ve walked and discovered parts of Boston I had never seen. I’ve written poems I might actually read out loud and songs I might sing. I got some homework done. I’ve spent time with a bunch of different friends and have actually felt like I am cultivating new relationships. I have reunited with old groups. I have practiced guitar.

And even more unexpected than all of the positive lifestyle changes, has been my actual health. While I have been sick for a solid two weeks almost (another story for another time), I have been feeling incredibly healthy in a couple of ways I never have. The biggest one is sleep. I’ve always had a hard time sleeping; getting to sleep and staying asleep. But since I have stopped spending my last hours awake with my face glued to a screen, I have gone to sleep between 11pm and 1am, and wake up pretty consistently between 7am and 9am. I also eat less junk food. And I’m outside more, walking more, exercise and fresh air more.

My roommate is going to be ordering internet soon, and in reality, we do need for school a lot of the time. But a part of me is sad. It has been easy to avoid over-indulging in the internet when I have had to get dressed and buy a coffee. But the temptation to lounge about in my sweatpants is on the horizon.

As corny as it is, I will be fighting for my freedom!

josephhurd:

I used to pray like God was listening.
I used to make my parents proud.
I was the glue that kept my friends together,
Now they don’t talk and we don’t go out.

I don’t have internet in my apartment anymore, so this is gonna get a little less frequent. I was thinking about just going ahead and getting a blasted internet service but it’s not really worth my time or my energy to get any sooner than the fall 2012 semester so I will WAIT UNTIL THEN.

It might be interesting to only get internet when I’m in a free space. Prob should get rid of Netflix though. Ho hum.