21st Century Digital Girl*

The end of last week, I had no internet at work. It's a long, boring story of incompetence and destructive behavior and I won't bore you with it.

But, as I result I realized two very important things about myself.

1. I spend a lot of time online.

2. I am totally incapable of surviving for long periods of time without a reliable high-speed connection.

Let's focus on number 2, because 1 is just stating the obvious, here.

I do not use the word surviving here with the requisite sarcasm. This is not like when I am "starving to death" ten minutes before dinner and an hour after a granola bar. This is not like when I am "writhing in pain" nestled into my bed and wondering if it would be okay to take a Tylenol PM. This is surviving, as in, I may not survive the winter if we don't get the furnace fixed.

I don't think I devoted much time here to the traumas of the ice storm, except for my homelessness updates, but one thing that was disturbing to me this time (I've been through this before) is how utterly dependent I am on electricity. I could not cook, could not stay warm, could not care for my children without some form of electricity for at least short periods.

Last time, I went a week without any power and did just fine, thank you very much. I was bundled up, reading by candlelight and eating cold spaghetti-o's and rejoicing my decision to not purchase an electric can opener. That was before kids, though.

Now, I can't even fathom the thought. We started packing as soon as we realized the power was off. Last week, I felt the same way at work.

It seems that everything I do, I do online. I don't have a radio anymore, I have Pandora. I don't have a phonebook, I have yellowpages.com. I don't have any form of communication except for email. Okay, that's a lie, I have a phone and mail and a fax, but all of my contact information for any of those methods are stored on my online database.

Furthermore, I can't even do my boring, envelope-stuffing-type work without the internet because there are no blog reading breaks.

Really, it's sad how attached to this little box I am.

I got a message in the mail today. We are trying to move over to more online communication methods and had sent out a card requesting email addresses. One woman responded by saying that she would like to continue to recieve hard copy communications and that she prefered not to "live in the computer." I live in the computer. And I like it.

And I'm good at it. Yesterday I took the kids outside for some much-needed vitamin D rich sunshine. I weeded a flower bed, Brynna played with our dog and a neighbor's dog and Maren napped. And got sunburned. That would have never happened if I had been playing online.

I'm still gonna do another bed tomorrow night if I can.

* Contest time! I love the blog contests on some of my favorite sites. Pioneer Woman has the best ones, but don't participate because I already have waaayyy too much competition. Okay, so, I want to try it myself, but I don't have the funds to send you anything spiffy, but I will send a hand crochet scarf to the first person who can correctly identify the bizzarely obscure reference in this post's title. I'll even give you a hint, it's a song...