Or: I Am Starting to Think My Relationship with the Internet is Getting in the Way of My Relationship with Cinema and I Am Considering the Ways in Which I Might Fix This
As I related in my entry yesterday, one of my goals for the new year is to watch three movies a week. So far, I have watched zero movies in 2013. None. And it certainly isn’t for want of movies to watch. I own well over 100 films, if I remember correctly, and there’s a fair percentage of those movies that I’ve never even watched. I pulled all of those unwatched films off the shelf today, and right now they’re making a fairly tall stack next to my little HDTV.
And yet, even with the stack encroaching on my almost neurotic penchant for neatness, I have only felt slightly motivated to pop one of the discs into my DVD player and settle down and watch it. And I’m starting to think that my slightly terrible relationship with the internet may be to blame. I’ve been having a sleep-dep day, and for some reason I’ve felt the need to spend most of it poking around the internet. I spent a fair amount of time reading a baffling and infuriating blog about women in academia being talked down to by male colleagues (mansplained.tumblr.com, for interested parties). I messed around in a browser Pokemon game, and also freaked out over the announcement over Pokemon X and Y, the Gen VI games that will be coming out later this year for the Nintendo 3DS (I will admit my main reaction was along the lines of, “CRAP I HAVE TO GET A 3DS”). I even managed to step away from the ‘net long enough to film a video for my YouTube channel, a non-internet activity that nevertheless involves the internet.
But for some reason I don’t want to sit down and watch a movie. I know, rationally, that the internet will still be there when the movie is over. But there’s a weird part of me in the back of my brain that doesn’t want to miss anything, that would rather catch new posts as they come on Tumblr rather than slogging through pages of slow-loading gifsets once I return. I would rather watch a movie half-distracted, with my laptop on my lap and my eyes and attention constantly switching screens. I would rather just not watch movies at all, and that makes me really sad inside, because I love movies. Or at least I thought I did.
Naturally, since this is the year of Getting Shit Done, I think a plan needs to be implemented in order to help me do what I want to do and yet simultaneously want to avoid. I’m not sure what the plan is, but I imagine it will involve closing my laptop, or toggling the wireless card off, or even leaving my room and watching movies in the living room with its large TV and superior sound system.
I think I’ll probably just make myself step away from the computer. The internet isn’t going anywhere. It really, really isn’t. While it is a constantly-refreshing beast that tries to convince us that we need to know everything the moment it happens… we really don’t. It makes us think it’s going everywhere, but in truth it’s going nowhere that we can’t follow easily with a quick scroll.
I can live for a while without the internet. And if I’m replacing it with a good movie (or twenty-five of them), so much the better, I say.
(7/260)
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