TKOG who pretends the internet doesn’t exist

Today’s guest post is written by the lovely Brain Doc, who is not only a mean bowler, but probably the coolest chick I ever met in high school. She is also — fun fact! — the reader of my FIRST-EVER TMI THURSDAY, back when I was fifteen and programmed an eyelash-curlingly TMI tale on my TI-83 and forced her to read it while she tried to pay attention to chemistry class. And now she does brilliant, brainy research on the human brain while I’m … still writing TMI tales and forcing people to read them. Huh, funny how that turns out. Stay in school, kids.

Anyway, take it away, Brain Doc!

NTKOGuest Post: The kind of girl who pretends the internet doesn’t exist.

I am: an owner of a smart phone, and am thus unequivocally attached to the internet. I tweet, I text, I waste time browsing for nothing.

I am not: sure the last time I used a book to look up a fact (actually, it was last week, but it was a digital copy!).

The Scene: My abandoned phone and laptop computer. Sigh.

I share a car with my Fiancé, so, unless I drive him to work, I’m usually homebound on the weekends, which gives me time to catch up on work I neglected the previous week. At first, I had thought to go to my school library and work there the whole weekend, but decided that would be the easy way out. So I faced this challenge head on, at home. No internet or texting from midnight Friday to midnight Sunday.

I actually managed not to use my computer the entire first day. It sat unopened on the coffee table, staring at me, wondering why I had abandoned it. The only consolation I had was that it would soon be Monday and I could take full advantage of it once again. I had some reading material printed out and I managed to breeze through the articles in record time. But once that ran out? I was stuck playing “Toe or Finger” with the cat (who was only willing to play for one toe before getting all bitey and stabby).

Ultimately, I ended up grabbing a book from Christmas that I’d been meaning to read. And I watched a shit-ton more tv than I normally do. Incidentally, did you know CNN is a lot more annoying to watch than it is to read online? Or that Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence made a movie together about being fake-engaged? Or that Tia and Tamara Mowry are still making twinsies movies? Or that MTV has a show about annoying pregnant teenagers? ZOMG TV!

I also only used my phone to make phone calls! There were text messages, but I did not respond to them by texting; I actually called people (I should, like, get double points for this because I hate talking on the phone)! It was so hard not to text or tweet, though! It started raining and my first thought was, “I need to tell Fiancé!” (we live the desert, dudes; rain is a big deal), except I couldn’t text him, nor could I call him because he was at work.

The weekend did have moments where it really tested me, though. Like when I randomly came across a show about dinosaur sex. DINOSAUR SEX. And then when I randomly came across the dinosaur sex show AGAIN and they were talking about whether or not dinosaurs experienced orgasms and pleasure (btw, they decided it didn’t really matter, because they kept mating anyway). Or when there was a kitty showdown in my kitchen because some random cat decided to try to infiltrate through the doggy door and my cat got super territorial and they had a kitty-slap-fight through the flap. Or when the US totally came back with less than 30 seconds to go in the hockey game. Or when a research assistant in my lab texted me to ask if it would be inappropriate to choose an article about daily vaginal swabs for a group discussion.

The hardest part of the weekend, though, was when I actually had to use my computer to get some work done for class. It is extremely difficult to be ON a computer and not be on the internet. Not being able to go online made it really difficult for me to concentrate while working on my computer. I normally give myself little “treats” for doing random things. (Oh, you finished a paragraph sentence in that really boring article? Go see if anything new has popped up in your Google Reader!) But since I couldn’t go on the internet, I turned to tv. The thing with tv, though, is that you can’t just watch five minutes of a show and go back to work; you have to watch the whole episode, because then how will you know if Joe ever gets rid of that girl who is staging photo ops with him to make it look like they’re dating so she can boost her own (horrible) acting career?

The Verdict: It’s not quite so hard going cold-turkey off the internet if you’re not actually on a computer; but if you’re using a computer and trying not to be on the internet? You’ll watch the Jonas Brothers on the Disney Channel just to make the pain go away.

Tagged as: computer, dinosaur sex, internet addiction, IT'S ALWAYS A TOE, lulz, sometimes i look at people who have non-smart phones and literally have trouble fathoming how they function