No Laptop!?

So the year has ended; graduation has come and gone, and with it so has my school laptop, which I've had for the last two years. I wouldn't have thought this was a big deal, but turns out a lot of my life was on that laptop. Is this sad?

Two and a half years ago, when it was announced that every student would be required to use a school laptop, everyone freaked. Everyone thought it was a really fucking dumb idea, and we reluctantly took them at the beginning of our junior year. But two years with them have passed, and they've become a pretty intricate part of our lives. I check all my (four!) email accounts from the same application on mine; I visit all my favorite sites daily (which I can easily do because they're all bookmarked at the top of my web browser); and I keep various lists and word documents going on that computer continuously as things occur to me-very convenient (supreme court cases, or thoughts on my next show). It was all fucking great, and now I'm strangely lost without any of this convenience. I don't remember to check up on what the Court is doing, or see if anyone's emailed me, or update my blog (the most tragic of them all!). It's an oddly disorienting experience is what I'm saying I guess.

But is it also a liberating one? Over the past year, there have been only a couple of occasions when I've been completely deprived of electricity. The first time that comes to mind was a stormy day last July when the power went out in my house for a 24 hour period. I didn't have any electronics to entertain me, and most of my friends were out of town for the weekend. So what did I do? I curled up on the couch for hours and hours, reading a new book with a headlight that runs on batteries. It was an amazingly liberating experience for me-I hadn't had that much fun in ages. It was intellectually stimulating, and throughly enjoyable.

The other time that comes to mind took place last March when I was flying to New York to see some relatives and look at a few colleges. My dad and I were to take two flights: one from MN to Indianapolis, then one to New York. The layover in Indianapolis was supposed to last only two hours, but horrible weather (ah, a motif!) kept delaying our plane for an hour or two, and we ended up boarding our plane in the early hours of the morning, having been at the airport for almost twelve hours! Everyone that heard that story felt really bad for us, telling us that it must have been horrible being cramped in that airport for so long, but truth be told I had a blast. I didn't have my laptop with me, and my ipod was dead, so I did the same thing that I did during that storm in July-I read for hours and hours. This was also amazing and liberating. Being yanked out of my routine like that was a refreshing thing.

This all isn't a way of saying that I should read more, though I should and I'm trying to. That did seem to be a theme in those two stories, but the real theme was a lack of electronics. Without a computer, a tv or an ipod to mindlessly escape into, I had to resort to other things to entertain myself, and I enjoyed every second of it. That felt like real living, not the hours I spend playing xbox or WoW on my computer. I read a lot, talked to the people around me in great depth, and just thought endlessly. These last couple of days have been interesting in a similar way. It's a thought is all: what role do electronics really play in our lives? Is technology an improvement, or is it erosion? I'm beginning to suspect the latter.

I don't know though. It's a thought, is all.

Chice