A Day Without Electronics, Mostly.

Essay 2, as promised(look at me keeping my promise and all that). This is a longer one. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the last post, but I’m still somewhat proud of it.

I’ve never really thought about all the time I spend dinking around with electronics throughout the day or even just the electronics I use everyday in an attempt to appear normal. I use my iPod on a fairly unprecedented scale, in my opinion at least. If it weren’t for teachers insisting on lectures then I’d probably only rarely take my headphones off. I counted once and discovered I use my iPod for about 5 hours minimum each weekday. Outside of that, I subscribe to Pandora which envelops another 2 hours a day or so, and then we can throw in the hour or so of YouTube videos I watch every day. That’s just music though, there are other ways I abuse electronics though they often overlap with music. At time of typing, I’m listening to my iPod, using my laptop (obviously) and habitually checking my phone every few minutes. One of these days I’m going to become a robot and I’ll be so happy you’d think I was programmed that way. But of course that’s not all I use in one day. I have my desktop PC at home which gets a regular use of over 6 hours a day as well as occasional use of the radio, T.V., Nook, Wii, and other excellent distractions. If I take a peek outside of entertainment I begin to feel a bit sick with my dependency. There’s the basic stuff; oven, microwave, fridge/freezer, heater, lights, fan, etc. I’m beginning to think I have a bit of a problem with electronics, they seem to have a hold on literally everything I do. I wake up to an alarm clock and I go to sleep with music from my iPod. During the day there are only a few seconds, yes seconds, that aren’t taken by electronics. Of course during those times the lights are still on and the room is either being heated or cooled. It’s seemingly impossible to escape from electronics in today’s society, though I felt it time to at least try to diminish my use. In essence, I was going to take a day off from electronics. Music is my crutch that quite literally gets me through the day on some occasions. I was forced to allow in some electronics though, or I wouldn’t be able to function at all. This has less to do with my personality and more to do with the fact that I have an electronic bus pass and I won’t wake up without an alarm. So, ignoring those two kinks in my plan, I strode forward with my plan. The day before I was going to set out with my experiment I went to the bank to get some cash so I could hopefully avoid using my debit card. I was already missing the music even though I was listening to my iPod at the time and still had a good 12 hours until I was to begin.

The Monday morning began like every other, with that fucking annoying buzzing that I want to strangle somehow. I chose Monday because I knew it was going to be dreadfully dull anyways, I might as well lump all the negativity I can into one day. I absolutely despise the sound that alarm clock makes, its like no other I’ve heard, though it certainly wakes me up. I fell to the floor and dragged myself to the shower as per usual, wary of what was to come. Once I was clean and nearly half awake I meandered back to my room and sat down. Usually I would waste ten minutes catching up on Facebook and YouTube but today I wouldn’t allow myself that luxury. Instead I opened up my small black book and wrote down a few chunks of ideas still hanging around from my dreams. I remembered a few things about a certain someone I had been meaning to write about, as well as a neat little idea to improve a scene I’d been working on for a while. I glanced at the alarm clock and realized I was a couple minutes behind my normal morning schedule so I begrudgingly began to dress and get ready for the rest of the day. Once packed and presentable I stumbled downstairs and yelled goodbye to the empty house (a habit of mine). I began my morning quarter mile walk to the bus stop instinctually reaching into my left pocket to pull out my iPod which was sadly vacant. I’d forgotten what I had set out to do already, but I was smart enough to predict my idiocy and left my iPod on the charger at home. Sighing deeply, I headed to Sorentos for some tea before my inevitably late bus. The walked seemed longer then normal, which I had sort of expected, but it was a fairly pleasant day out so I didn’t really mind listening to the few birds along the way. It’s strange to me that birds are so much more apparent when it is a nice day. I mean, I know they tend to stay out of the rain, but I still see them when it is raining, I just don’t hear them as much. After getting my Chai I trundled back along the path to the bus stop, stopping only once to pet a passing dog and her owner. Though it’s probably worth mentioning I only petted the dog, I simply said “Hello” to the owner. The next ten minutes or so were spent waiting for the bus as always, and this was the first time I really felt the annoyance of not having my iPod. I live on the outskirts of town so the bus stop is rather far from my house and not many people ride that bus. No one, in fact, was at the stop with me that Monday which made me feel rather lonely. Something I was certain I would feel much more of throughout the day. The bus finally rolled down the hill only 6 minutes late which admittedly wasn’t too bad but I was already in a fairly uneasy mood so I complained to myself. I got on, flashed my bus pass next to the reader and took a seat towards the back. I could hear the music from the kid sitting in front of me, just enough to know it was there but not enough to recognize the song, and I began to miss my iPod again. The bus ride was unexciting to say the least and certainly nothing extraordinary or eventful happened while riding it. I caught my transfer for the first time in a couple weeks and was slated to get to Bellevue with an hour to spare before class. Normally this would excite me, it would give me time to catch up on some homework or just goof around on my laptop but sadly this was not possible. I’d left my laptop at home to help stop myself from straying and I didn’t have any written homework to work on really. After about forty minutes on the bus, as we neared the school, I began to think up things to do while waiting for class to start.

I ended up spending most of the time sitting in one of the comfy chairs on campus, near the cafeteria, watching the people interact with each other. It was interesting for me to see what was normal while on campus for everyone else. Of course I’d seen this before but I’d always been distracted by my music or had my laptop handy to provide a quick spurt of entertainment. This time I only had my notebook to entertain myself with. I’d tried sketching some of the people around me but they would never hold still for very long, and I’m hardly good enough to sketch a person from memory. I gave up on that after fifteen minutes or so, lacking the inspiration to create my own idea of what to draw. I instead turned to writing again. I opened my little black book and looked over the notes I had left for myself in the morning, as well as some from a couple nights ago. The first one wasn’t much help “something about how unbearably pretty she is and music”. I decided for the fifth or so time that I wouldn’t leave myself notes like that in the middle of the night. I read over the rest but none of them felt important enough for me to elaborate on so I put that away too. I looked up at the clock which told me I had thirty minutes until class started. The people around me seemed fidgety for some reason, like they didn’t want to hang around for very long. I shared the feeling so I clambered out of the comfy chair and went outside to see if I could escape the the noises surrounding me. The sun was hidden behind seemingly the only cloud in the sky keeping me comfortably shaded as I strode out of the C building and headed towards a set of tables. Music started popping into my mind as I walked, trying to distract me and pass the time, but instead it reminded me of the iPod I no longer had. I sat down at the table and took my notebook out again thinking maybe I could get some writing done now that I had a new location. I actually managed to get a good chunk of a story I’d been thinking about down on paper which helped calm me down a bit. I spent much time working on that story, until I noticed a sudden increase in volume and quantity of people around me. Classes must have let out which meant I had about ten minutes to get to my room. I packed up once again and set off, making it with plenty of time to listen to everyone else in the classroom. Class progressed as per usual, I of course never use my iPod while in class so nothing was new to me in this regard, though that didn’t stop the class from dragging on and on. When our class finally finished I said goodbye to my project partner who I hadn’t yet spoken to and left in a flourish, hoping the faster I moved the faster the day would end.

I didn’t feel like the day was going miserably or anything, I just felt like something was missing, like an important aspect of my life was absent. I suppose this is a fairly obvious revelation as I was indeed missing something dearly important to me, but it didn’t shake the unnerving feeling of a deep absence. Admittedly music and therefore my iPod was what I missed the most, it was usually like a little bubble of protection, keeping the outside world away while my mind danced by itself. I thought this over while riding the bus home, it seemed a reasonable distraction and passed the time fairly well. I’ve always been a daydreamer, imagining future situations and how the recent past could have been different if I said just one out of the ordinary sentence. I imagined my classmates reaction if, for once, we struck up a conversation. I wondered what we would talk about, what we could talk about, and what their reaction to hearing my voice more than once a week would be. They didn’t seem to care in my mind, which is probably fairly accurate to the indifference they seem to emit. The bus pulled into Redmond and I reflected on how quickly the day seemed to be progressing all of the sudden. I just barely caught my transfer for once and was headed home much earlier then usual, perhaps a reward for my experiment. Though because I was on a new timetable thanks to the early bus there were people I’d never seen before aboard my usual route. Of course I paid them no attention, hoping my lack of headphones wouldn’t act as an invitation to a conversation.

I escaped the fifteen minute ride without so much as a hello, thankfully, and started my usual walk home. I quickly realized that this was the first time in probably two years that I’d made this walk without my iPod. It was an odd realization that really made me look at my daily routines and how similar every day seems to be. The only real differences being up to people other then me, everything I have control of seems to stay the same. I get out of bed at nearly the exact same time every day, drink the same tea every morning, ignore the same people on the bus, find a quiet chair to sit in while waiting for class, etc. There is very little change in my schedule from day to day and I, for a fleeting moment, thought that perhaps I should change that. I imagined a life in which people actively engaged me in conversation and looked forward to seeing me every day. It was of course just a dream, but someday I think it’s one I can make come true. My life has been so shut off from the outside world simply because I hide behind electronics and rush from dark corner to dark corner, avoiding others, it’s starting to become unhealthy. When a scientifically social creature shuns others and keeps to himself, he is seen as peculiar at best and outright uncomfortable at worst. I’ve recently been trying to reconcile my abandoned social personality in a way that’s somewhat comfortable to me but still progressive. It’s been slow but I’m starting to see progress in my ability to hold a conversation and live without my iPod. I still have it on me at all times, but I’m starting to prefer other people to the lyrics in my headphones.