Day 1 - The End of My World

Alright, after getting this whole hand out for the Media Deprivation project I knew it was going to be one of the hardest projects ever. Want me to write some twenty page paper about the bio-mechanics of botany? Done. Do a power point about persuading an audience to do community service? Done.

But take my electronics away for 48 hours?! Not cool.

First a little introduction about myself:

I'm a 20 year old college student that lives life behind a computer screen the majority of the time. I do go out and do social things, but mainly once every couple of months. I attend huge gatherings called Anime Conventions. I am a gamer as well as a woman in love with the Japanese Anime that I drown myself in every day. I choose to associate myself with the same kind of people so that I don't get judged as often as I normally do and in doing this I have shut out the majority of the world to live in my own filled with people that share the same interests as I.

Moving on...

I treated my Friday night almost like a pre-game to the whole project. I woke up early and spent my entire day listening to my iPod, playing my Playstation 3, playing World of Warcraft and surfing my facebook and deviantart accounts obsessively. I also spent the entire day telling all of my friends (through text message) that I would be pretty much dead to the world for the next 48 hours of my weekend.

I thought this whole project was a bad idea and would be the worst to keep up with since my entire life has now become so involved with media. Needless to say, I was a little wrong in my assumption.

I woke up Saturday morning and sighed to myself as I unplugged all of my consoles along with my Television. I had about 30 missed text messages and I checked them all to make sure they weren't important. At this time, I also turned off my mobile Twitter and Facebook so that the only texts I would get would be from friends.

I turned on my computer and forced myself to do nothing but check my email and then shut the system down. It was possibly the hardest thing that began my weekend. I've never realized this before, but my way of having fun had changed so much since I was a child. I remember going outside and running up and down the streets with friends and playing all sorts of crazy games.

But ever since I got my own personal computer it was almost like my world of physical fun came to an immediate end and it became all about the computer screen or the video game character running around on my television. Why did I let myself get like this? I have no idea to this day, but I'll try to understand a bit more later.

My breakfast Saturday morning was silent. I would normally plug my iPod in and my room mate and I would jam out and make our eggs and bacon with some toast, but instead we joked around and actually had a conversation about the project.

As the day went on I began wishing that I'd slept in later because waking up so early only ensured that my whole day would just drag on forever.

Around noon, I grabbed my dog Julius and gave him a nice groom. He's a Yellow Lab and since it's the beginning of the summer season he is beginning to shed a ton of hair all over the place. I brushed him out for almost a complete hour and then proceeded to give him a bath.

After the bath time, I did a little one on one training with Julius before retreating upstairs. Bored out of our minds, my room mate and I talked for a bit about what we did as kids before we both fell asleep out of sheer boredom.

Once I was up and walking around from my nap, I decided I couldn't take it anymore; if I couldn't text or call anyone since it wasn't important, then I wanted to take matters into my own hands.

I logged onto the facebook and posted a status update saying that I would be at my favorite Hookah lounge at 10:30 PM and anyone that wants to hang out is invited. With that posted, I logged off of facebook, trusting that my friends would show up.

Later on in the day, my room mate and I got dressed up and went to the lounge and, sure enough, some of my best friends showed up to have a good time! :D

We talked, laughed, joked, danced and just had a freakin' awesome time during our entire stay. Around 2:30 AM we all decided it was time to book it. We exchanged hugs and got in our cars.

My room mate mentioned being hungry so we decided on Denny's since we had no reason to really go home. Normally we would rush home and jump on World of Warcraft to run raids and instances with our guild, but since the project was going on we really didn't have a reason to go home just yet.

Driving down the highway, my friend Jay was driving next to us since he was at the lounge with us too. I rolled down the window and our shouting conversation went just like this,

"WE'RE GOING TO DENNY'S!"

"I'M GOING!"

So we all met up at Denny's and had our late meals while talking about conspiracy theories.

I looked at my phone and realized it was about 3:50 AM and we decided to get back home as soon as possible.

I came home and crashed in my bed and slept the night away until about 3:48 PM.

I do have to admit that it was really hard to start the day off without my usual media consumption, but choosing to actually leave the house and hang out with friends was almost freeing in a weird sort of way. I felt like the whole project would just shut me out from the world and, for a while, I almost let it do that.

Breaking and logging onto facebook to make that announcement about hanging out was the best rule break I ever decided to make and all of us thought it would be nice to do it more this summer since our semesters are coming to an end.

I still want to figure out exactly when I went from being so physically active to just coming home and being sedentary all the time. I'll have to look more into it, but I think this blog is getting long enough already! xD