The Fall semester has been a little tough on both of us. Organizational flurries, class preparation, responding to student work, extensive travel... we've both been running to keep up for the past eight weeks or so.
And one thing that happened a couple of weeks ago is that I no longer have home Internet or cable TV service. My wonderful landlords, who lived upstairs in the second floor of a two-family house, have moved a few miles away to a new home, though they're keeping my house as well. Mike was a huge television fan, and has loads of friends who are contractors and Comcast techs, and so he had the whole house wired and subscribed to a full-load cable package (though, oddly, we weren't subscribed to Channel 134, Neo Cricket... I've always wanted to learn more about cricket, and this channel had 24 hours a day of matches between Pakistan, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, and basically every place the British had colonized during the 18th and 19th centuries... but no luck). So when they moved away, he canceled his Comcast subscriptions, and I've had a two-week blank spot before my own subscriptions begin next Monday. And I still won't have Neo Cricket.
Plus they took back my TV-recorder box, which had two dozen pool tournaments saved on it. I'd probably watched Jasmin Ouschan beat Ga-Young Kim in the 2009 US Open about ten times, another form of homework.
(The opening of her bio from Inside Pool... "Hailing from Klagenfurt, Austria, Jasmin Ouschan was born January 10, 1986. Her parents owned a pool hall, and she began playing pool at the age of 6." That's a universal line in every elite pool player's life story... Efren Reyes' uncle owned a pool room, and he started when he was five. I wish my parents had owned a pool hall...)
It's been fascinating living in a house without Internet access. I haven't done that since 1992. It was a taken-for-granted pattern that I would come home from work, take off my coat and put down my briefcase, and hit the start button on the MacBook. Being without it has been alternately stressful and peaceful. Stressful because I'm not able to continue working as intensively from home as I had (it's remarkable how much work-related e-mail I did from home, in the evenings but especially on the weekends). Peaceful because I haven't been part of the Internet's attention-deficit culture, the constant hopping from link to link to link.
I've kept up with reading The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, neither of which had made it to the active list very often when I had the web. It's fun to read writers who have more than six paragraphs to do their work, and who take on large ideas and do it engagingly. (If you don't read the New Yorker, I'd suggest finding a copy of the October 11th issue and reading Calvin Trillin's hilariously tangled story about turf wars among the cash-for-gold brokers of Toronto... nobody but the New Yorker would publish that.)
I've gone to bed before 11.
I'm very tempted to just leave it shut off. But I do get more work done with it, and the World Series is coming soon, and Nora needs web access when she's in town, too. Plus I haven't been blogging. So on Monday afternoon, the Comcast technician will stop by the house with a new box and a new modem. I hope I remember how much I've enjoyed not having it, and that Tuesday doesn't find me immediately turning the computer on the minute I get home from work.
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