Without the Internet

So.

Yesterday I was in Helsinki, in a meeting where we making first plans about a new type of protu camp for next summer. We already have camps that specialise in getting teenagers think about life's big things via arts, music, theatre and sports. Not that we wouldn't have all those on regular camps, but there is a shift in emphasis towards certain methods on those camps. Next summer we are getting a new type of camp, never tried before: writing. In general there is very little writing happening on protu camps, except for the letters every night, and the notes everyone writes for everyone full of nice things about them in the end of the camp. So we (I) decided, that we want a camp where all the book nerds can come and try to figure out their life in writing.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I'll tell you what.
I left my laptop charger in Helsinki.
This means that I cannot use a computer at home before I get it back.
This means, that I have to live more or less without the internet for a week, since I'm going to Helsinki again on friday, though then I'll spend the weekend teaching kids fresh from their own camp how to go and make a great camp for new kids. Yes, I'm still talking about protu. So the next time I will have access to the internet or the rest of the laptop at home will be next Sunday.
And that sucks. For two reasons.

1. People are used to being continuously connected. This is the first thing I noticed. I am used to always having my laptop on when I'm home, and on my laptop I have open a dozen tabs on the internet, the main ones being facebook and three different e-mails. Which means that I am used to being connected to other people all the time. Even if I sit alone at home and study, I have all the time the possibility to get up, walk to the laptop across the room, and start chatting another person. I rarely do that, but I had the possibility, and the possibility is what makes a person feel connected. Now that that possibility is taken away, I feel detatched from the world and alone. Because in a world filled with computers and smartphones, as long as you have access to the internet, you're never truly alone.
I am not one of those people who spend huge amounts of time on the internet, even though I have it always right there, ready. I just have it open, and do seomthing else. This week, I had a plan to study so that I could get a few exams out of the way before March. So I was surprised of how much just not having the possibility to easily comminucate with people (true, I still have a phone, but in a world with the internet, I've noticed people don't really contact you via phone, including texts, unless they actually have something to say) affects a person's life.
Being disconnected feels bad.

2. Simple practicality. I don't have access to e-mail. I need acces to e-mail, because I have e-mails to send and answer about the new camp I was just talking about earlier, and the weekend coming up. Not being able to communicate with the rest of the seven-person team teaching the kids how to make a good camp is very, very impractical. Trying to plan a weekend without having access to e-mail is, well, pretty much impossible, since e-mail is the primary way of communicating. We also use Skype and google Drive, which also, surprisingly, require the access to internet.
Also there is the point, that I am a university student. I have material on my laptop that I should study for an exam that doesn't exist as a book and is too long to actually print out. Also I have a group project to work on for this class about communiation in groups, and we are supposed to communicate and agree on a time and place to meet to get started, yes, you guessed it, on the internet. So, as a university student, I actually need a a computer and the access to internet. Not having the access to internet at home makes my life more difficult on a practical level.

So yes, not having a laptop with batterylife at home makes life a little more lonely and difficult.
And before you ask, I am at the university right now, in one of the numerous computerclasses found all over the campus. So yeah, when I come all the way here, I get to use a computer. But still, it's difficult, and I have to plan my time usage a lot more accurately. For example, ir is Monay noon right now, when I'm writing this, because tomorrow I don't have tie to stay at the university and write a whole blog post. I was going to write this (well, about somehthing else) tomorrow evening, at home, but it turns out I can't.

So, it's going to be an interesting week.

~matu

PS. I'm giving up on the thing. I've been hiding a quote from a book (fiction), some book, to all the previois posts. Some of them are a little too obvious, and now I'm starting to run out of quotes (not to mention I have a list of them on my laptop, that I don't have an access to), or rather options. I still have great quotes left, but for some reason I'd need the quote to have something to with what I'm writing.
But we can make a game out of it! Can you find all the quotes in all my posts? I'm pretty sure you can't, since you haven't read all the books. Though some of them don't really fit very well into the rest of the text, so they might be easy to spot anyway.

Yeah, you're probably not going to go to try to find them..