A real digital divide

As a bunch of you know, I've had spotty Internet access lately. While it's given my lots of time to do off-line things like read actual books (I highly recommend "The Historian," by the way), it has forced me to live my off-work hours away from blogland. Sure, I could read blogs from work, and even write out my posts (literally write out--with a pen and paper!) and plan all the things I would say when I had reliable access again, but no way in hell was I going to actually log into blogger and post from the office. People in my field have been fired for that, repeatedly. And so I was forced to sit on the sidelines for days, weeks even, unable to participate. Oh how I pined... (note: heavy, heavy sarcasm).

So I've had lots of time to think about what it means to be online and connected. Now that I've been able to post all these entries that have been sitting in a notebook, you should know my feelings on the digital divide and how it often serves as a punching bag of sorts for all that ails our society. I admit I wasn't completely in the dark--I had lots of time at work to browse the Internet, after all, and it's not like I wasn't checking my e-mail 800 times a day like always. But still, without the nightly Internet fix, dripping into my body hour after hour like so much heroin, I did things like clean my apartment, laundry, go for walks and read books. Maybe if we just unplugged everyone for a few weeks a year, the world would be a much more calm place.

Bonus perk: Not paying much attention to Karl Rove for many days. God it felt good.