Kat with a K

I love electricity.

My power was out when I got home yesterday, and didn't come back on until almost bedtime. Now, this was a short enough outage that it wasn't a major problem in any way, by which I basically mean that I didn't have to miss a shower and the ice cream in my freezer didn't melt. But I felt like I should find such outages to be, I don't know, refreshing, or a nice change of pace, or delightfully old-fashioned, or something. And I didn't. At all. I sat and read by candlelight, so it's not like it was an unpleasant evening, even, but there were things I wanted to be doing. I wanted to cook dinner. I wanted to knit lace. (I realize knitting doesn't technically require power, but I would have had to light a whole lot more candles.) I wanted to finish season two of In Plain Sight. I wanted to obsessively check for an e-mail I'm expecting without worrying about draining my phone battery. I wanted to watch Glee while everyone else was watching and tweeting about it. I wanted my TiVo to be merrily going about its tasks, including recording things that I probably won't watch for weeks or months, so the prospect of watching online doesn't help.

I'm not sure what my point is here, except perhaps that it's always fashionable to talk about dropping off the Internet or getting rid of your TV, or whatever, and there's this idea that getting rid of technology makes you a better person, and I'm calling shenanigans. If some people prefer to live that way, more power (ha!) to them, but don't bring virtue or enlightenment into it, and drop the holier-than-thou bit. Sure, none of these things are essential. I realize that. But I have absolutely no desire to attempt life without my laptop or my smartphone or my TiVo, and I'm fine with that, and I honestly don't think it reflects negatively me or my generation or society as a whole.

I feel as though we reached a tipping point, anyway, the first time I called my parents and discovered that they were in bed, watching their new TV, with their laptops, on their wireless network.