Excuses, excuses

I’ve been MIA the last week or two, mostly with good reasons. One weekend was my birthday and I spent it with my family, who drove down to see me. We had a lovely time seeing family friends in Connecticut and eating waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many sweets. Most of my spare time this weekend went to a freelance project that I’m having a lot of fun with, and it’s going to be consume a lot of time over the next few weeks, so I apologize in advance if my posts are a little sporadic!

I had one other good reason for not posting last week: for four days, my apartment had no internet connection. I made an appointment with Time Warner, but until he showed up on Friday afternoon, my apartment was an internet-free zone. No email, no Netflix, no Facebook. I’m so used to using Spotify I had to remind myself to open iTunes and put on some music I own. At which point I realized that even though my iTunes is out of date and Apple keeps reminding me to update it, it had been so long since I used iTunes for more than a few minutes to listen to one particular song or album, I didn’t know how to navigate it very well.

I put on an old, old favorite album – so old that I don’t think it’s on my iPod, which I’ve had for well over four years, so old that I remember slipping the red CD into my silver Walkman and groaning when the display flashed “Lo” because it needed new batteries. I’ve always been a repeat listener. If it’s good the first time, it will surely be good the second, seventh, fifteenth, fiftieth. ITunes thinks most of my top played are Taylor Swift songs, and they aren’t wrong, these days. But surely over my childhood I listened to this “Hit Songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber” more times, or I wouldn’t still remember most of the words to “Tell Me on a Sunday” and “Any Dream Will Do”.

I wrote those two paragraphs last week when I didn’t have internet and then kept writing, and it turned into a first draft of a longer piece about my relationship with music that I’ve been thinking of writing for months. It’s rough – very rough – but there are 2242 words in a document that weren’t there before tonight, words that had been swirling in the back of my mind. I know I wouldn’t have written them that night if my internet had been working – I’d have done some writing for that freelance project I’m working on, but I also would’ve watched some episodes of “Friends” and messed around on Facebook and listened to the same station on Spotify I’ve had on the last few weeks instead of revisiting Andrew Lloyd Webber and then Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

I love the internet – it teaches me things and entertains me and keeps me in close contact with my friends who are scattered around the country and even the world. But I think the enforced hiatus I had last week was a good thing for me. I was able to focus enough to write over 2000 words in one sitting because I couldn’t stop and check email.

Maybe if Time Warner sends me another feedback survey, I should suggest they create a plan where you choose one day a week to be internet-free, enforced by them. Think of how much we’d all get done!

Well, maybe.

The weather here in NYC has been pretty terrible – either desperately cold or snowy or, now, terribly slushy. It makes going out a chore and if you’re me, it makes not going to the gym sound like the right thing to do. I can’t wait till being outside is a wonderful thing again. When it is, I’ll start doing more here in the city than commute back and forth to work. I got a fancy new camera that I need to learn how to use – once I do, expect even more pretty pictures.

In the meantime, here’s to productive weeks and better weather soon! I know there’s that whole in like a lion, out like lamb thing for March, but no one said the lion part had to last very long, right?