I’m probably the unluckiest
person this week in terms of internet access. For one thing, our shared
connection at the dorm got interrupted because of unpaid bills. Throwing
caution to the wind, I tried hitching on my friend’s internet connection at
their flat just to check my emails and follow-up on my fan girl brouhaha (you can’t
beat that!) when, ten minutes into my comfortable surfing, the internet
connection went zilch! So I decided to get all the way to my hometown just to be online (oh well, unlimited internet). Much to my chagrin, the
internet connection bolted at around 10 in the evening. It’s like getting
jinxed for the third time!
So I literally spent 75% of my time
this week off the wires. But guess what? Having no internet connection for a
few days can have positive results, too. It made me realize that you can’t
always have the best of everything: you may be good at stalking and surfing about
your favourite people and haul excellent school references, but fate can twist,
wrench, and turn your day from happy to total haywire. It got me thinking that
the idea of “no internet = no life” is not 100% true at all. It can actually make you think that there’s
more to life than just being stuck on the wires 24/7.
I have put together a few of the
things I did in the course of my internet hiatus. I’ll share them to you as a
guide in case you undergo this kind of crisis, too.
Do a little throwback by surfing through your files from the previous years. It can be academic related or just a compilation of your high school photos and diary entries. You see, looking back is not all the time awful. A few minutes into this throwback session and you can find yourself giggling like a silly high school girl while thinking about the memories and the emotions you had when those photos were taken. In my case, I travelled back to our production days and watched videos and projects that my batchmates produced and thought about the struggle we experienced back then. It made me realize that those days are over, that I’m only watching them from my screen, which means that I surpassed those hurdles. More of that stuff will come, for sure, but my mantra then will always be “2 years from now, I’ll just be looking back on this one, laughing.
Clean up your files. Most of us download stuff on the internet – photos, music, files, and other whatnot– and they end up on a single landing folder in your computer (except if you really take time choosing its destination every single time, then you skip this one). All those files mix up and the next thing you know, you have Narnia, Middle Earth, Hogwarts, Westeros and New York City files higgledy-piggledy in your downloads folder! So take time to organize those files into folders with specific names so you won’t have a hard time looking for that photo of your celebrity crush you downloaded eons ago just because you want to change your wallpaper. Cleaning up is nice because you can also figure out the unnecessary files you need to move to the trash just like how we decide to move on from the ones who got away from our lives (#hugot).
Explore programs that you often neglect because you think you don’t need some of their features. When you’ve got nothing to do, experiment with Photoshop or your video editor or even the encyclopaedia package in your computer (I don’t know if they still exist). You’re gonna feel like a kid discovering how a vending machine works for the first time when you discover an amazing trick that program can do for sure, but I guarantee you that you’ll feel like a mad scientist the next time you do that trick in front of others. There’s nothing really wrong with learning stuff in advance. It helps you in a way that you add more knowledge in that roster of things-you-already-know in that brain of yours.
Do homework that doesn’t require the internet. I’m sure you have that reaction paper for a film or an essay about your dog or you need to fill in that questionnaire in which answers can be found in your text book. Stuff like that does not necessarily require the internet. If they do, maybe just a minor detail that for sure can wait. When there’s no internet, it’s a perfect time to actually do that stuff. There’s no distraction in the form of that constant (and sometimes annoying) ding of the FB messenger or the nonstop flow of tweets on Twitter and all the other wonders the internet can offer you.
Socialize. When I say socialize, it doesn’t have to be on the wires. Remember the most basic form of socialization is direct interaction with people. Talk to your mom, call your friends, meet up with them, grab a coffee (but don’t activate your Wi-Fi or else you’re gonna defeat the purpose of real-time, real-life socialization), jog a mile or two, meet new people (and probably score a hot date!), play with your pet, clean the house and pilfer with inanimate objects in your room or tool shed, anything as long as it does not involve opening your computer. You know what I mean. It pays to breathe fresh air and actually talk to people, you know. You wouldn’t want to get yourself tangled so much into the wonders of the web day in and day out, unless you’ve got plans to become a modern hermit cooped up in your room with five o’clock shadows on your face all the time, an unattractive belly flab, and poor social skills. That’s not exactly sexy.
Do a little throwback by surfing through your files from the previous years. It can be academic related or just a compilation of your high school photos and diary entries. You see, looking back is not all the time awful. A few minutes into this throwback session and you can find yourself giggling like a silly high school girl while thinking about the memories and the emotions you had when those photos were taken. In my case, I travelled back to our production days and watched videos and projects that my batchmates produced and thought about the struggle we experienced back then. It made me realize that those days are over, that I’m only watching them from my screen, which means that I surpassed those hurdles. More of that stuff will come, for sure, but my mantra then will always be “2 years from now, I’ll just be looking back on this one, laughing.
Clean up your files. Most of us download stuff on the internet – photos, music, files, and other whatnot– and they end up on a single landing folder in your computer (except if you really take time choosing its destination every single time, then you skip this one). All those files mix up and the next thing you know, you have Narnia, Middle Earth, Hogwarts, Westeros and New York City files higgledy-piggledy in your downloads folder! So take time to organize those files into folders with specific names so you won’t have a hard time looking for that photo of your celebrity crush you downloaded eons ago just because you want to change your wallpaper. Cleaning up is nice because you can also figure out the unnecessary files you need to move to the trash just like how we decide to move on from the ones who got away from our lives (#hugot).
Explore programs that you often neglect because you think you don’t need some of their features. When you’ve got nothing to do, experiment with Photoshop or your video editor or even the encyclopaedia package in your computer (I don’t know if they still exist). You’re gonna feel like a kid discovering how a vending machine works for the first time when you discover an amazing trick that program can do for sure, but I guarantee you that you’ll feel like a mad scientist the next time you do that trick in front of others. There’s nothing really wrong with learning stuff in advance. It helps you in a way that you add more knowledge in that roster of things-you-already-know in that brain of yours.
Do homework that doesn’t require the internet. I’m sure you have that reaction paper for a film or an essay about your dog or you need to fill in that questionnaire in which answers can be found in your text book. Stuff like that does not necessarily require the internet. If they do, maybe just a minor detail that for sure can wait. When there’s no internet, it’s a perfect time to actually do that stuff. There’s no distraction in the form of that constant (and sometimes annoying) ding of the FB messenger or the nonstop flow of tweets on Twitter and all the other wonders the internet can offer you.
Socialize. When I say socialize, it doesn’t have to be on the wires. Remember the most basic form of socialization is direct interaction with people. Talk to your mom, call your friends, meet up with them, grab a coffee (but don’t activate your Wi-Fi or else you’re gonna defeat the purpose of real-time, real-life socialization), jog a mile or two, meet new people (and probably score a hot date!), play with your pet, clean the house and pilfer with inanimate objects in your room or tool shed, anything as long as it does not involve opening your computer. You know what I mean. It pays to breathe fresh air and actually talk to people, you know. You wouldn’t want to get yourself tangled so much into the wonders of the web day in and day out, unless you’ve got plans to become a modern hermit cooped up in your room with five o’clock shadows on your face all the time, an unattractive belly flab, and poor social skills. That’s not exactly sexy.
Well, that’s all I’ve got to say.
In the end I realized that there are so many productive things which you can do
without the glory that is the internet. I get to touch base and reconnect with
the precious little things I somehow forgot in the hubbub of my wired day-to-day
lifestyle these past few years. It’s nice to get off the techie life sometimes,
stretch, and smell the flowers. In any case, the world and life is too
beautiful to miss out on the more important and invaluable things apart from
the internet, don’t you think?
0 comments:
Post a Comment