Re: Concepts That Should Be Revisited

(Again I am cribbing the title of this post from my previously-entered history for title bars. I like this conceit so much, I might just keep with it.)

We lost our internet for about 26 hours.

Human beings have existed on this planet for around 200,000 years. Compared to the 13.7 Billion years that our universe has existed, that is nothing (well, technically it's .00145% of the total time, if my math is correct, which it frequently isn't). A single day of human existence constitutes about .000000000002% (calculated again through my limited mathematical skills) of the total time of well, totality.

And yet those last 26 hours were probably among the longest days of my life. (The longest day of my life, as defined in a 24-hour period, took place on a bus to Florida last year. Sleeping on the floor of a bus is not fun. Failing to sleep on the floor of a bus is even less fun.) I am shamelessly addicted to the Internet. Not only does it provide me with news and information from all over the world, it gives me much more interesting and useless pieces of information like what photos my friends have appeared in recently or the fact that Batman died a few days ago.

As a college student, the Internet also plays a very important role in my life. It allows me to communicate with my professors, turn in assignments, comment on readings, research for papers, and more importantly for today, find out where and what I can eat (only one of the dining halls is open for Winter Term each week, and it rotates. It didn't rotate this week). College students rely on the internet so much that while reflecting on our predicament, I mused that a good social experiment would be to cut off Oberlin's internet during Finals Week and find out how long it takes for the students to burn the school to the ground. I'm betting about 3 hours.

The other difficulty is that I am by nature a fairly introverted person. I enjoy, if not relish my alone time and especially enjoy the fact that I have my room to myself this month. Though I love my teammates, I've seen them multiple times a day, every day, for the last two weeks. I lived with multiple other people for one of those weeks, with precious little time to myself. To put it lightly, Sunday afternoon and evening I was looking forward to spending a little bit of time alone.

And my Internet shut down.

To claim that the day was a disaster would be going too far. I spent more time with my teammates Sunday afternoon, having fun and being productive in the snow. Sunday evening I got non-Internet related things done, including some writing for this blog, watching TV shows I haven't seen in a while, beating several cases on Carmen Sandiego (though with my Internet gone I was unable to answer the almanac-based promotion questions), and reading some books. I made the best of my situation and I enjoyed myself.

So maybe I was exaggerating the severity of the situation. It was fun to make jokes along the lines of "well, you could E-MAIL something to us" to Mark Fino, and to bitch with my teammates over a shared problem (well, another shared problem other then the whole swimming thing).

But seriously. I need to stay on top of this whole Batman dying thing.