Saturday, November 20, 2010
Unplugged
I have a most delightful weekend ahead of me, but it's going to leave me out of reach of wireless connection until mid-Sunday, so I thought I'd jot a quick note this morning just so I wouldn't have missed a day. My best friend's husband works for the CSO, and he has quite obligingly gotten the four of us (including the First Mate) comp tickets for Beethoven's 4th piano concerto tonight. I'll be traveling to Chicago right after work and staying with my mother, who lives nearby. My mother does not have an internet connection. Or TV or a landline, for that matter.
Now, I went a month without my own internet connection when we moved, and it was one of the most frustrating months in my recent memory. Sure, I missed my daily memefeed, and since most social gatherings are arranged very quickly over facebook I also missed a lot of those, but the worst part was I hadn't quite realized how used I had gotten to having instantaneous access to collective human knowledge. Okay, I've always got access to books, which are the more permanent dissemination thereof, but I-- and a lot of my generation, most likely-- have come to view Google search as an extension of our own memory. I don't know what, say, the chief export of Bolivia is, but I can ask the metamind, as my friends usually put it, and that's just as good, isn't it?
Well, no, frankly, it isn't. For the next two days that storehouse of experience to which I catch myself feeling entitled will be inaccessible. It doesn't bother me not to be immediately able to, say, produce a list of the major exports of Bolivia, but when I struggle with questions like "How do I get downtown?" or "How long do you boil an egg?" or "What was on the program of the concert I went to on my 21st birthday?" I know I'm in trouble. And, of course, without a blog audience I'm going to have to corner people and talk rapidly at them, and that never works out as well.
Have a good weekend, metamind. I wish I knew how to quit you.
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