While the Internet Was Down

The internet stopped working today with no explanation and no warning. And it happened at the most inopportune time!

It stopped while I was in the middle of micromanaging my tribe of shipwrecked islanders via Facebook’s highly addictive MyTribe game (in summary: it’s a free game where you start with 7 tribe members and guide them through technology and skill developments as they age, have babies, specialize in skills like agriculture, fishing, and construction, and the goal is to build a Great Ark to one day leave the island). My tribe is up to 15 members, the oldest at 49 and the youngest is 3.

I have given my tribe members ancient Greek names (like Gaiana, Helarios, Lysistrata, Leonidas, Kallisto, Demosthenes, etc.) because one of my favorite websites, www.behindthename.com, gives me millions of names organized in lists by region, language, time period, popularity, and religion. Without perusing those lists, I wouldn’t know that Demos is Greek for People, or that Kallisto (meaning “most beautiful”) was a young woman fancied by Zeus, so Hera turned the beautiful girl into a she-bear and cast her away into the night sky to be a constellation. (Just another example from ancient times that illustrates the frustration of watching your husband as he watches younger nymphs.)

How pathetic I am, and how very tired I am becoming, every few seconds looking at the bottom-right corner of the screen, hoping that the little network icon will indicate that I am once again connected to the World Wide Web and all it has to offer.

Dusty and I were marveling just last night at the volumes of books that were published by great authors long ago, in the days before we could type 75 words-per-minute. How did Shakespeare do it? How many rough drafts did he have to painstakingly write by hand before he came up with the final Romeo and Juliet? And even after type-writers were available, how did H.G. Wells manage to write so many thought-provoking works in his lifetime without the ability to copy and paste and spell-check and cross-reference with other sources at the click of a button?

I am going to assume that growing up with computers and the Internet has made it difficult for my generation to memorize and think for ourselves...  Where are the Tolstoys and the Cathers and the Poes?  Will there be anymore of them now that our lives have been made so easy?

How does a stay-at-home-mom suddenly write a book that appears in the top 10 for young adult readers, and then gets a movie deal within a year? Twilight isn’t the best book you’ll ever read, but it’s fun and the people like it, and the movie is gorgeous (although I refuse to comment on its horrible sequel).

I know the internet will return one day. But until it does, I have no way to obsessively-compulsively check my email, or manage my tribe, or lookup information to help me study for and write my final exams. I can’t go to www.dictionary.com or www.thesaurus.com to quickly copy and paste a word from this document to find one that sounds better than horrible.

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Hey, guess what? The internet just came back into my life. It was down for a little more than 2 hours, and in that time I was able to put a 3rd coat of red paint on my front door, write this horrible article, and do a load of laundry. Oh, the marvels of technology!