Spend less time online and more time on life

I’ve been spending more time with people, although that has drained my social abilities pretty badly—which is why I am sitting online right now.  All the same, I have finished two books in two weeks and have not spent nearly as much time wasted on the Internet.  And I studied a lot.  This is a good sign.

Summertime is my worst season.  (Porgy and Bess were wrong!  The livin’ is not easy!  It’s hard!)  I typically have nothing to do, and while my time online is usually spent thinking, I should do that offline in my journal.  So this goal is basically completed; as long as I can last out the summer with reasonable Internet time and accomplish some of my goals, this can be marked as done.

This is going comparatively better (“comparatively,” of course, being the key word in this sentence).  Over the course of the past few weeks, I have had an absolutely ridiculous workload in school - even over spring break! - so there frankly has not been time to vegetate for more than an hour or two without, you know, not being able to sleep.  I had a pretty horrid experience with that the week before break, I decided to drink too much caffeine and have a spaz attack at my sister until about 11 before even starting anything.  Point in case: don’t drink and Internet.

Even my free time, though, has been going productively.  I have my twenty-page paper of DEATH written, went on three campus visits, finished a few books, kept up my grades as As, and actually did things socially rather than make myself popular through pixels.  Maybe over the summer I will be offline almost completely…well, no, that’s impossible, I will still be staying up until three or four in the morning.  :)

If I can go through this week staying off of AIM and not use anybody’s laptops on the band trip in May, I think that I can consider this goal completed.  There are so many people that I should have done things with more frequently before they graduate this year, and there is so little time left to do it.

I always feel awful spending so much of my time online, especially because I know that I will never gain these hours and years back, but without friends or transportation or anything else to do in town, what alternative is there?  I read.  A lot.

Not willingly, of course, but with so many doctor’s appointments and so much homework to keep me occupied, I was in bed by 9.30.

In my years on this planet, I have never been known to be a people person, an outgoing type, an extrovert.  For as long as I can remember, my personality has been extremely introverted; I have difficulty opening up to people or approaching them for any sort of help, and when people do eventually start to grow close, it is impossible for me to simply, say, invite them over for a while.  Social phobias abound.

This being said, my friend Sandy, who happens to be the most extroverted person in my life, invited me to her birthday party yesterday.  I am not within her circle of friends (we are friends, of course, but I am outside of her “popular intellectuals” group despite my high IQ) and so while in a graduating class of 200 it is impossible not to know everybody, most of these people being snarky and/or obnoxious and/or pretentious and/or generally disliking of me, it seemed appropriate to go because it is her birthday and she would have been saddened had I not.  It was a disaster!  Everybody else was having a grand time, so I smiled and pretended to be enjoying myself whenever she came around to chat, but honestly, these people in my town make me want to beat my brains in and not to mention that whenever I would try and be friendly and approach people, they would make me feel completely unwelcome.

I would like to have a life outside of the Internet, this is true, but must it really involve socializing around people with whom there is a mutual dislike?  Jobs are one thing, mind you, because that is nearly inevitable, but if this is the way that college (FAR AWAY FROM HERE) will be, and the way that the rest of my life will be, I have to wonder if it is worth the hassle.  Honestly, is it such a crime to want to be on my own?  I am happier alone or with my sister, whose only contact is through the Internet, than I could ever be with the people around here.

Over this vacation, I tabulate that almost all of my time (besides on Thanksgiving, obviously) has been spent online.  This is why I hate vacations and weekends so much!  It is not the loneliness factor; certainly it bites to be alone sometimes, but I don’t mind being on my own, as long as I have something to do and a person to talk at me.  And yet I have few friends and live in a town of 1,500 people with no entertainment, no care, and not even a flute anymore?  I read a lot, I sit on the Internet.  The fact that my life is such a waste of time is killer on the self-esteem.

Maybe I will just have to wait until college to have a life and friends, because it is hopeless to do so here without becoming fall-down drunk and banging your friends and neighbours.  I suppose, then, that it is also mildly pointless to have a pen-and-paper journal to record my uneventful life in until then, too, but hey, that is what the blog is for.

On Friday afternoon and evening, I was at my friend’s house and goofing about with her family in celebration of her seventeenth birthday on Monday.  I returned home at noon the next day, sat online, slept, and logged online for nine hours.  This is pathetic.  =/

Does working on an art vector of old friends as a gift for them, while on the computer, count as “more time on life”?

I have lots of homework due by the end of this week and a Masterminds competition tomorrow evening that will take until at the least 5.30, and what have I done so far this afternoon?  Sit on the computer, take a nap, sit on the computer, take three pages of notes, and sit on the computer.  ...well, no, actually, some of my laundry was done, but for the most part, this habit of the Internet is hindering my ability to concentrate on the work given, even though I quite enjoy the subjects assigned.  I am fully aware that this addiction may ruin me and I want to stop, but at the same time, talking with my sister seems important as well because she goes to school five or six states away and I miss her.  Or is that my scapegoat?

Nevertheless, perhaps I should ask my parental units to take the computer away during the school week.  It may encourage me to spend more time rotting online during Saturdays and Sundays, but at least it shan’t ruin my grades.  I will get on that tomorrow, as there are too many Internet-based assignments to avoid doing today.  Luck?  Love?  Something, anyway.

My birthday was on Saturday, and although I still came upstairs to check my AIM messages every few minutes, I wasn’t online for nearly as often and thus it is a step in the right direction. I even used the phone with my sister instead of talking to her online, which I assure you is a major change!

I used to have a clanky old PC and dial-up modem so going on the internet was slow, frustrating and costly. I’ve now got a shiny new laptop with constant wifi broadband which seems to have cast a magnetic effect on me. I hope that the novelty will wear off soon so that I can get back to having real interaction with real people rather than this virtual life I seem to have been sucked into. No offence intended 43ers.