Abstinence: 24 hours of chores and revelations

So this abstinence thing was harder than I thought it would be and I realized how much I take the internet for granted. Over the 24 hours I realized that I am very much a here and now person which tells you how patient I am. During the abstinence period I was tempted several times to go online to check sports scores. I am a huge sports fan and ever since I was able to check sports scores on my phone it has become a habit for me to check when the Mariners are playing and I’m not near a computer. I was out with some friends the other night while I was abstaining and my friend asked me to check the Cubs score and I told him that I couldn’t cause of the assignment. We then got into a conversation about how difficult it was and my friend told me that he thought he could do it for longer. So I dared him to do it with me. Literally 10 minutes after me and my friend had made this 5 dollar bet that he couldn’t go 24 hours he was on another friend’s phone checking the scores.
This incident occurred maybe 3 hours into my abstinence and I began to question if I could do the whole thing. But I still had 21 hours to go and only 6 of them would be spent sleeping. So the next morning when I woke up my first instinct was to check my email like I do every morning, and then remembered I couldn’t check it for another 15 hours. Man this is hard especially for communicating. I have several friends who are traveling abroad and we send each other online messages via facebook and twitter as to how each of us is doing and I must say it was frustrating not being able to read what my friends were up to.
Now the amount of time I am on the internet varies from day to day. Some days I just check my email where on other days I’m often chatting or playing games, or just simply browsing the internet for things to buy (or that I want to buy eventually). So I had time that I needed to fill that I usually devote to internet. I’ll tell you it was nice to take a day off from school because all of my classes are online, it was like a mandatory day of hooky. So I began to watch a movie to kill time but after the 90 minute movie I realized I needed to do something else, and that’s when I got productive. I mowed the lawn, unloaded the dishwasher, cleaned the living room, and did 3 loads of laundry. Now you d think that would take a long time but in reality I had only killed about 3 and a half hours. So with 11 hours to go I made lunch called some friends and we hit up the mall. Cruised it like we did in high school and slowly realized how lame cruising the mall was. We then went and saw the new transformers movie and grabbed some dinner. Then we went bowling and before I knew it the 24 hours was over and I hadn’t even noticed. I didn’t realize how distracted I was and then I began to take other things for granted, like, what if there were no movies like I’ve heard my grandparents talk about so often, I’d probably lose my mind because of there is one thing I love more than sports its movies, but also things like automatic scoring at bowling alleys, I have no idea how to manually score at bowling. Other things like my Ipod, that I use to entertain me when I mow the lawn rather than have to listen to the mower, or even the dishwasher and the washer and dryer I used earlier having to do dishes and laundry by hand. So looking back I realize that the internet abstinence wasn’t so bad, now if you asked me to abstain from all technology I would have probably called you crazy and lied on this whole assignment.

Peace, Love and Rock and Roll
Dave