Dear Hypothetical Reader (I'm going to call you Hypothesis, for short - I hope you don't mind),

If, hypothetically, you existed, you might have noticed that I haven't updated my blog in over a month. You might even have concluded that I had lost interest, and that Reflections by the Black Glass Bay had become yet another of the abandoned blogs which are scattered through cyberspace. Nothing could be further from the truth, Hypothesis!

The fact is that I make these blog posts at home, in the evening, and, for the last few weeks my laptop was away being repaired after it blew its motherboard. It is now returned.

Which is to say that, for over a month I had no computer (and therefore no internet) at home. When I mentioned this to people at uni, many of them looked at me with the greatest of pity and said things like "I couldn't live like that!" Well, now I'm back to having both - I survived the unsurvivable!

... But I'm not sure that I'm happy about the return of the 'net.

On the one hand, without internet access, I was quite cut off from the latest in world events, news, journal databases, tv on demand (I don't have a tv, either), and of course from contact with you, Hypothesis. On the other hand, I was also cut off from gmail, facebook, youtube, wikipedia, flickr, my rss feed, and webcomics. 

Those might seem to be the same hand - but the fact is that that latter category are absolutely enormous time sinks. In a perfect world, one would check one's email, say, once or twice a day. But no one does that. Instead, I find myself checking my email with great frequency - at least twice or thrice an hour. Everytime that I check it I then, also, check my rss and facebook to see if anything has happened on those. If something has I then deal with it immediately (though of course it is not urgent), and then it can take five or ten minutes to reorient myself to whatever I was doing in the first place.

This is putting aside the times when I get caught up checking wikipedia pages - almost inevitably ones that I have in fact read before - or about things which I've read about in more authoritative contexts. Nothing quite like reading things about which you already know.

Whereas, while I was without laptop at home, I got an incredible amount done - I took up ancient Egyptian and was progressing rapidly through my text books - about a chapter every two-three days. Since the laptop has returned, that progress has slowed to a crawl. And I don't feel like I'm doing anything useful instead.

Computers and the internet are a great help to my life - my thesis is far easier (and will be far better) thanks to journal databases and word processors. My engagement with current events is almost totally through news websites and word-of-keyboard. But they are also, I'm increasingly aware, the bane of my life - providing a vast impetus to procrastinate.