Hello September and hello internet! I’m back from my one month hiatus and feel partially overwhelmed (Facebook! So busy! So much to look at!) and partially wonderful (a long-read essay on why the movie Clue is so awesome? YES PLEASE!). Here’s what my internet-free month looked like by the numbers:
Books I Read: 11 (plus 5 poetry/essay manuscripts for friends)
This includes two books for book reviews, along with Vampires at The Lemon Grove by Karen Russell, Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith, the first four Lying Game novels by Sara Shepard (I know…I know), Freak of Nurture by Kelli Dunham, Portrait of An Addict As A Young Man by Bill Clegg, The Dinner by Herman Koch, and like half of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Words Written: 22,199
…and I constantly berated myself for not writing more — writers! We’re crazy!
Number of Crap E-mails I Got: 827
Lesson learned: e-mail — It is mostly crap! It is a lot of junk from J. Crew! The most important e-mail I got over the entire four weeks was one telling me I was awarded a residency I applied for (!). They sent it on a Tuesday and I saw it on a Sunday — life goes on!
Times I Cheated And Just Had To Google Something: 4
How to Make Cake Flour, How To Get a Brooklyn Library Card, How To Stretch Pizza Dough, and when the Union Square Greenmarket is because I just couldn’t handle calling 311. And technically I forced my girlfriend to Google Beyonce’s new haircut because, c’mon. I had to.
Times I Had To Peek At My E-Mail Because I Forgot A Password For Some App I Decided Wasn’t The Internet: 3
Songza, Seamless, and My Fitness Pal — a true internet purist may have skipped all internet-fueled apps, but there were some that I just couldn’t pass up, including Netflix, ABC Family (to watch Pretty Little Liars, duh), Songza, My Fitness Pal, my bank app, and Seamless — but I only used Seamless once because it felt like total cheating when I could call the pizza place myself.
Number of Letters And Postcards I Sent: 6
Number of TV Shows I Gorged On: 3, including two seasons of The Lying Game, four episodes of Pretty Little Liars, and three seasons of Skins
Many people were skeptical that I wasn’t online but I was watching Netflix. And seeing how I watched hours upon hours of bad television because of this loophole, I get it. But when it’s eight pm and I’ve baked a cake and written for two hours and read for four hours and meditated and rode my bike to get groceries and watered my plants — guess what? I wanna veg out and watch Netflix. It was a vacation, after all.
Number of Facebook Notifications I Had: 92
Number of Times I Missed Facebook: 0
But to admit, when I did finally log back on and see my friends’ names and photos and links to hilarious Buzzfeed articles I thought, oh! My friends! I missed them!
Number of Times I Read A Cookbook Instead of Googling A Recipe: 21
Cookbooks — who knew?! So relaxing. So wonderful. I cruised through many of the Smitten Kitchen cookbook recipes, and also got real intimate with Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything (and How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, which, I realize is redundant alongside the Everything one). I’ve now perfected making my own pizza dough (it involved the one cheat — I mean, how do you stretch it?! How?!) and also made Smitten Kitchen’s caramelized peach pancakes four times. So good.
Things I Am Dying To Google:
Beyonce’s haircut (again. I know.), baking soda vs. baking powder, free financial planning courses, cruiser bike, that drake song with the chorus “still got it”, is neutral milk hotel back together?, why was the lying game cancelled?, when does scandal start again?, what classes are at the gym by my work, best yoga videos on netflix, drywall anchors, december 19th beyonce tickets, new york times subscription discounts, september asbury park weekend rentals, outdoor summer movies, why is everyone talking about miley cyrus?
Biggest Takeaways From This Hiatus:
It’s nice to wake up and not check my e-mail. I kept replacing it with Wake Up And Play Spell Tower but once I deleted my games I seriously curbed the hit-snooze-and-squint-at-my-iPhone habit.
The internet time-suck for me comes via many avenues, but especially Google. In my first return-to-internet day, I watched myself have a thought (how would I make gluten free cornmeal pizza crust?), stop to Google it, and spend eight minutes reading recipes. This happened in bed with a book in my lap at eleven at night — WHY?! Why did I need to know about cornmeal pizza crust right there and then? Instant information — it’s too dangerous for me. I’m gonna try and keep my information seeking on a need-only basis.
Give me a big hug, internet. I kinda missed you.
Courtney Gillette 