After a series of events (some planned, some total surprises), I have been rendered less... uh, present, than your typical American twenty-something college student.
For better or worse, people of my generation exist more connectedly and in more places than people twenty years ago could have imagined. We have cell phones, Facebook, blogs, Twitter... not only can someone be reached wherever they are on the globe these days; they can get an update sent to their phone about what Nathan Fillion had for breakfast. In some respect, we are all a little bit more alive than prior generations, because we are practically omnipresent.
On the other hand, I realized over break that I had been caught up in media over-saturation and was probably the worse for it. That is more fully described in the previous post, but ultimately one of the steps I took was to delete my Facebook to make more time for individual pursuits. My initial plan was to dip my feet into a life without technology to further pursue my creative passions. I wound up tripping and falling in the deep end.
Within five hours of arriving back in Minnesota, I had deleted my Facebook. Within ten hours, my phone was dead and I couldn't find the charger. I realized that I had no money to buy a new charger (or food or gas, for that matter). I realized that I needed money to go on living, and so I was forced to accept new hours for the shuttle van (or more specifically, my old hours from last semester that had me working Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons), essentially losing my entire weekend.
On top of all of that, I am taking nonstop classes after chapel for the entire semester. I was also cast in the school play as one of the leads, so I have rehearsal for two and a half to three hours every night. That's about five hours of class every day followed by three hours of rehearsal, compounded with me having no phone, no Facebook, no money to do anything (including driving to and from campus more than once a day), and working on the weekend nights when all of my friends are doing things. I was driving shuttle nonstop to and from Arden last night when I realized I'd disappeared. To many people, I no longer exist. The only person truly aware that I am around most of the time is me, and even I'm not so sure of late.
There are good and bad sides to disappearing. The bad sides are kind of apparent (I think losing cell phone service is feared by my generation just slightly more than death), but the positives are numerous as well. I no longer wait around on the internet for someone to come on and suggest a direction for my life. I sit down and read a book or work on homework, which was kind of the goal of this whole experience. I've had trouble writing the last couple of days, but I'm sure it will pick up. I've definitely got loads of time to sit in the shuttle and think about it.
On top of this, I'm pretty sure I won't be dead for long. This is one of the exciting things about going into exile in the wilderness (I'm even growing the beard for it right now). Nobody ever goes into the wilderness, survives, and then return without something that's totally frigging awesome (or maybe people do, but we don't have record of them in history). For me, working on the play, senior project, and prepping for my trip to Nashville at the end of February should be motivation enough to get me through the doldrums of January and February. Those months suck no matter what happens anyway, so I guess it's not too much of a loss.
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