Electrolicious

Oof. Wednesday night was hard. Unplugged night started at 5pm Eastern, when I boarded a plane in New York heading home from a super intense day. Predictably, it’s always hardest for me to unplug when there’s all sorts of shit going on online.

And at 5pm EST on Wednesday, there was a lot going on … nothing like a national television appearance to fill your inbox. I was fielding emails from friends and family with lots of questions, calls from my lit agent, comments on various blogs, and just to ensure I REALLY didn’t want to unplug, even a hurt email from a colleague that I wanted to take some time to respond to, but zoinks: there went the plug. Everything would have to wait.

I spent the first half of the flight home finishing Twilight. Once I finished the book, I still had almost two hours to kill and not one but TWO fully charged laptops in my carry-on luggage. Usually, when I’m coming home from a trip, I like to do a written brain-dump to get what happened out of my head and onto the page where I can contextualize it and figure out what just happened to me by reading it back to myself. (I still haven’t decided if this is neurotic or just the earmark of someone who’s journaled for most of their life — take your pick!)

But of course then I remembered it was unplugged night. So I scribbled notes to myself on paper and re-read my favorite chapter of Twilight and stared at the air. Hmm. So air-like.

Upon landing in Seattle, I told myself I could make one cell call to Ellen, to coordinate picking up Sassafras. But evidently the technology gods wanted me to stay unplugged, and my Sidekick refused to turn on. So I used a pay phone — uh, weird? I’m not germ phobic at all, but rubbing a public piece of plastic on my face was distinctly icky to me.

Once I was home, things got harder. Part of how I unwind from a trip is by throwing down my bags and immediately uploading my photos from my camera. I’ll spend hours happily processing my pictures and then sticking them on Flickr … I like getting my photos up as quickly as I can, as yet another way to process the trip and immediately share it with friends. This often means that my suitcases will sit half-unpacked for days — sometimes even weeks. Posting photos is way more entertaining than unpacking and doing laundry.

Being unplugged meant that, perhaps for the first time ever, I came home and immediately unpacked. I spent a lot of the evening fretting over all the stuff that was waiting for me online, but at the same time enjoying a sense of relief that there was simply nothing I could do about it. To say I came home from New York feeling anxious would be an understatement — I came home feeling squeezed dry, tapped out, run over, and otherwise used up.

I had trouble sleeping that night, and when I woke up yesterday, I found that technology was conspiring to keep me semi-unplugged … my phone has been on the fritz since I got home (randomly shutting itself off, sending calls straight to voicemail instead of ringing) and yesterday the internet at my house went down for 6 hours.

One nice side effect of unplugging? Normally these technical difficulties would send me into a complete tailspin. As it was, I just shrugged, took a bath, and fell asleep. I think I’ll deem that a successful side effect.