I no longer strive to strive towards such things

Part of me would like to tell you that my experiment with ditching home internet access failed. That no matter how many tools you take away, there you are, or something. It wouldn't be true, of course, but part of me still feels as though it ought to be.

I don't know—maybe the experiment would have failed, if it weren't for my neighbor with the unsecured wireless network that lets me check my email (slowly), check the weather (five times a day instead of ten), and skim the headlines. Maybe I'd go crazy without that stuff. Probably I'd go crazy. But not half as crazy as I'd go if I had a stable internet connection that let me surf, shop, and watch streaming video.

It's been six months since I got rid of my home internet, but it didn't take nearly that long to prove to myself that it was the right decision. It didn't take six days. The day after I stopped having constant access to the internet, I started cleaning my house. Then I cooked, and read, and exercised more than my minimum weekly schedule. Then I made Ender's freakin' day just by lying on the floor for ten minutes doing nothing.

It's insane how happy that cat was, having my undivided attention. And it broke my heart, thinking how much more painful this could have been—how much worse I could have messed things up by letting the internet slowly come between me and a husband, or me and a child. I like to think I wouldn't have let it go that far if I were married or a mother, but who knows? You see it happen to families all the time.

It's a lot harder to accept that I thought it would be. Not because I miss the internet (I don't) or because I care what people think (I shouldn't), but because I've always had friends, real-life or internet-only, who live in other places. They're very nice about it—not one person I'm close to has given me grief about not being online as much—but there are certain things that just don't happen anymore. Is everything I've gained by giving up time on the internet worth missing one late-night IM conversation with a friend I love?

I'm not sure that it is. All I know was that I had to get a part of myself away from the internet. Maybe there was another way, a better way, to do it. But I picked the only way I could be sure would work.

Learning to live with home internet access is still on my to-do list, but it's been moved to the long-term to-do list. It won't happen this year or next. Probably not the year after that, either. Unless my neighbor wisens up, or moves away, or gets a geek boyfriend. Then we'll see how I handle it.